JASON COOK/CHRISTOPHER GOSCH
On February 28, Four For Fun — a movie written and directed by Jason Cook (ex-Shawn, DAYS; ex-Matt, GH), which stars Brytni Sarpy (Elena, Y&R) and Jacob Young (ex-Rick, B&B et al), will premiere at the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood, CA as part of The Golden State Film Festival.
Sarpy enthuses, “It was certainly a passion project and everyone that came together really put in the time and we all worked around each other’s schedules.” She says of Four For Fun, “I would categorize it as a dark comedy. It tells the story of what happened in a dinner party, but it gives you, I believe, 12 different scenarios of the same story going in different ways. It kind of like reminds me of the butterfly effect, where if you change one thing, then we have a whole different outcome. There are a lot of comedic moments [that are] a little dark and twisty. There are surprises that come along the way that I won’t ruin for anyone.”
Sarpy plays the role of Desirae. “This is actually a character I hadn’t really done anything close to before,” she reports. “I really had to pull from a more sensual, more grounded, older version of myself. She’s kind of the powerhouse in this entire story. There’s four leads and she kind of runs the energy of the entire dinner.” Sarpy loved taking on the challenge of Desirae. “She was written so well,” she praises. “I like being the leader of the energy at times and really moving the story along. And I also like her story arc because different things happen [and] you find out different parts of the same character, even though they’re essentially the same scenario happening in different parallel universes or something like that. But you get a wider understanding of who the character is by [seeing her in] these different situations.”
Young plays Sarpy’s movie husband, George. “That was really fun,” she smiles. “We had never met before this project but we know so many of the same people coming from the soap world. He’s incredible. He was the perfect husband for this project.” And while they worked on GH in separate decades (she was Valerie from 2015-19; he played Lucky from 2000-03), they did dish GH and piece together their characters’ connection. “We did establish that we were cousins, so that’s interesting.”
JASON COOK/CHRISTOPHER GOSCH
Supper Club: Brytni as Desirae with Jacob Young as George in For Four Fun.
The actress also gives high marks to her other co-stars, Donovan Patton and Annika Foster. “They’re such great actors and it was an instant bonding experience,” Sarpy says. “Everyone was so impassioned by the project that it just made it really easy. It was, a really, really fun process.”
Sarpy credits her soap work with her ability to work with the film’s shooting schedule. She explains, “Because we have to do so many variations of the same story, being able to work with multi-cam [multiple cameras] — and Jason also comes from soaps and has an understanding of how to work with multi-cam — really made it a lot easier trying to get the same thing over and over for four different perspectives. It just made it really efficient, just in the way that we shoot in soaps and how that translated.” And this isn’t the first time that her daytime background came in handy when working in a different medium. “I worked on Truth or Dare that was on Netflix a little while back, and that director, Nick Simon, told me that my first take was always my best take because soap-trained actors are used to being able to deliver in one take.”
Four For Fun‘s comedic bent was one of its appeals to Sarpy. “My very first project was a movie called You Again and I also did NEW GIRL, but this movie was a certainly a meatier project for me to dive into and actually take on a full comedic role,” she notes. “So this will be a nice change of pace for anyone who watches anything that I do. I was the goofiest child and no one ever sees that side of me! I’m always a very serious ingenue.”
The Golden Gate Film Festival is open to the public. For tickets to For Four Fun, click here, and check out the trailer below.
