Last year, a group of fellow journalists and I visited the set of the upcoming Melissa McCarthy comedy Life of the Party. The movie, which reunites McCarthy with director/co-writer/husband Ben Falcone (Tammy, The Boss), follows a housewife who goes back to college and lands in the same sorority as her daughter. On the day we visited, we saw the scene where McCarthy’s character, Deanna, gets dumped by her husband, Dan (played by Matt Walsh), immediately after dropping their daughter off at college. Click here for my coverage of that scene.

During a break in filming, we got to sit down and talk with Melissa McCarthy. We talked about her process for finding a character like the one she plays her, what she and co-writer/director Ben Falcone learned on their past projects, juggling multiple projects, working opposite Matt Walsh, getting to reteam with Maya Rudolph six years after Bridesmaids, and more.

Check out the full interview below. Life of the Party opens May 11th.

How do you approach playing a character like this?

MELISSA MCCARTHY: This is what I spend my time doing. I don't know what that says about me, but I love the ... I always start with the look of the character. That's usually based on someone that I kind of love, and I thought of this as my mom and my grandma.

You have a fashion ... You're a fashion designer, you studied it.

MCCARTHY: I do. I have a clothing line, yeah.

And like you were saying-

MCCARTHY: It does not look like this.

No ... This is just going to turn into an advert halfway though, and that's it.

MCCARTHY: Yeah.

And that's where you start a lot of character, based on wardrobe?

MCCARTHY: I do. A lot of times I'll go wig first. And once I get the wig, I have a weird thing where I immediately know, like specifically, almost everything. And then it's a matter of finding it and trying to make it happen, but I have a real weird thing of who I would, I'm immediately like—I'll get her. She wears cropped pants, like just at that height is too short to be really flattering, right?

What did this, when you kind of got into the look of the character, what did it, in your mind, tell you about who she was?

MCCARTHY: I loved her so much, because I thought she was such an optimist that had kind of been ... I mean, Ben came up with the original idea of going back to school, and doing it with your daughter, and then we had a weird thing where I felt like four times in like an eight day period, I felt like somebody said, "We're not really restaurant people," and "we're not really go out movie people."

People kept making these strange sweeping statements, and I don't remember why, but I had the weirdest reaction to them, like every time somebody said the words, I was like, "Oh, so like what do you do?" We're 35 and I was like, "Like at 70 you could move to, I don't know, you could move to Portugal and raise goats." I was stuck, you don't know what you're going to do, you may have 50 years left of your life, you're not even halfway." And it kind of kept, I don't know ... I went down a wormhole with it, with people just at way too early age being like, "Well, we're done. We're done, this is what it is, we can't evolve anymore. We can't change anything about ourselves." I just thought ... I find that so sad, and just a weird thing that you can buy into, and everybody does it in their own way, but I don't know, I went down ...

That's what this was all about, like really could like restart the clock, and I think I always kind of imagined that's what like the second chance thing, or the fifth chance, or the sixth chance, it was, I don't know. It's kind of where we spun out, from there.

What did you and Ben learn on Tammy and The Boss, that has helped you make this film?

MCCARTHY: Oh my, I don't know, fifty in that we feel, stop. We feel like every time it was like, "Oh! Brr." Like it was yours, she would have known that. I think on Tammy, I learned to really not be so prac- ... To get the takes they wanted, emotionally, but to realize that it was sometimes in that editing room, I had to string them all together, like Ben's much better about it, now, because he kind of sees the matrix more, I get very like encapsulated in the scene.

I think if somebody's doing this to you, it would crush me, it would destroy me. But if you have five of those, six of those scenes in a row, you're like, "Audience doesn't always want to be with you for ..." Even though it's accurate, you're like, you know, somebody's just crushed you, you would be upset, but it's like to kind of play levels more, instead of being so like, "No." Like she would be, "This is the appropriate response to this." Then sitting in the editing room, I'm like, "I wish I had an all lighter take," or "I wish I had a more intense take," and now we're really kind of always staying true to it, but I really try to always give different levels, depending on how that puzzle gets put together.

I think that's still a big one with The Boss, if something's tricky going, something's kind of like a tricky spot going in, it's usually going to be tricky shooting. So, on this one we really tried to like, "What rubs us, even in the slightest way, and let's work it out." Like we rewrite so much, anyway, it's a bit crazy.

You know, I've never heard about is seeing a little bit of what you and Ben do, today, like actual real ... It's also like have two handfuls of projects that you're developing, as well. When you're doing something like this, where it's like, "Okay, I'm producing this, he's directing." Is that right? Are you also like around for the day, or do you also like go work on that script that someone's going to read-

MCCARTHY: Right, I'm working on like a Nobodies script during this. I have that on my iPad, I tend to multi-function, it's kind of how my brain works, I think. So it's like I'll go do my clothing line on one break, and I kind of compartmentalize it, and then I'll take ... We also have really great people like Michael McDonald is our show runner, and the three people that are the stars and writers of Nobodies are phenomenal, so it certainly makes it easier for us to go, "Yeah, that's great. That's brilliant, that's great."

But, yeah, it all kind of gets ... it's all the same big ball of wax, like when you have 14 minutes down from here, we'll switch to one of the other projects, but-

Everybody's been raving about your working relationship with Ben. What is the easiest and the hardest thing about working with him?

MCCARTHY: Everything's kind of easy with him. It's just his personality, I mean, it's why I married him, he's kind of dreamy. He's super-mellow, super specific, but also if you're like, "Or what about this?" He's like, "Well, yeah, what do I know?" He's like, "Do it." ... I think, really lovely directors I work with, enough to know in that editing room, like you want options, all the options you have-... and he's just fun. He runs a fun, happy set. I mean, I think the hardest part is when we're here long hours, and away from the kids for the most part, and when they do finally come, they're not really here for us. They're here for like crafts, or like I give them a bunch of Sharpies in my trailer, and that's where they ran into Matt. They want something from Craft Service and Sharpies, and we're like, "I’m not buying that." But-

You’re Groundlings alum, and Matt is like a founder of UCB. I'm wondering like if you-

MCCARTHY: I'm going to duel.

Where there any subtle differences in your imprint styles that you noticed?

MCCARTHY: No, not ... I don't know. I don't know if you could ... He's truly one of the funniest, most grounded actors I've ever worked with. Sometimes I worry that he's going to tell me he'd rather do a serious story, or something like that, because I get real weird around him, and I did it in Ghostbusters. All of my off-camera, and I'm pretty good about like I try to really pay attention when I'm off-camera from somebody, and every time I just kept kind of collapsing and I would come back up, and I was like, "I'm so sorry, I'm going to go somewhere." That's horribly inappropriate, and I can't get through, I can't really get through.

So for me, I'm not seeing like technique differences. I just know that he's acknowledged mine, and he's really given so plenty, and so real, like he just said some of the most heinous ... And the other side of it, we shot yesterday, and I'm truly sobbing through the whole thing, because he's just out of the blue, in the midst of me thinking, "Here's Honeymoon 2, or it’s like we're gone." And he's just saying his ... He can also get away with that, like how he can get away with saying those terrible, horrible things to me. It hurts me more than it hurts him. Bah! But when you pitch him like a ... You'll pitch him something terrible to say, and he'll kind of like oil you a little bit.

Oh, yeah, he'll go, "Oh!" Then I feel like I've won, and Ben just said he goes ... I get really excited, he goes, if I yell something to Matt and he makes like that weird like "Gah!", because I think he's really, I mean, I just think he's unbelievable at what he does. It's kind of crazy. He never does a bad take, which I find irritating. Like all right, we get it. We get it, Walsh.

It's really cool to see that there are obviously so many frat-centric movies out there, like guys in comedy, and there are so few, I mean, you can count on one hand, the number that have been like women in comedy, especially once they kind of ... We talked to the actress who plays your daughter, and she was saying how it's kind of the same deal, of it's not focusing on their boyfriends, or the drama between that, it's really just the women working together.

MCCARTHY: Yeah, it is, and I think the women in this film really reflect that. I certainly didn't want to be like, "We're sorority girls," like not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not who I am. These girls are all ... girls, because I'm 107.

I said a lot of like "we" and "our age," and someone was literally was like, "When you're saying "our age," and Molly's 21, I don't think she clocks that." I was like, "Did I say our age?" They're like, "Yeah." And everybody's sitting there, I was kind of like ... they were like, "Argh."

But, no, I love that it's not like, "Can we get a boyfriend? Will we get a boyfriend?" Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not the story we wrote.

I find these women to be strange and eccentric, and really smart, and in a very, very interesting backgrounds, and I think that's why they fit the parts so much. I thought all the people I hung out with were ... They're strange, they're eccentric, they maybe were smart, or was not so smart. I just wanted to make it for more people that I would actually hang around with, and sometimes I don't like that stereotypical like, all guys in college act like this, all girls in college act like this. I just thought ... It didn't interest me, personally.

I have to ask, what was the Bridesmaids reunion with Maya like?

MCCARTHY: Oh, for where?

I mean, this movie.

MCCARTHY: I haven't shot it yet. It's next week. I thought you meant like in New York? I was like, "How do you know all this?" For a minute, I was like, "What do you know?"

Are you excited about bringing in Maya?

MCCARTHY: Are you kidding? Yes, she's heaven to be around.

And she plays your best friend, right?

MCCARTHY: She plays my best friend, we get to play racquetball together. We have her saying, in the same things, in the arbitration meeting, that made us really giggle, and we've known Maya, oh my God, sixteen years?

Yeah, something like that.

MCCARTHY: So to get her for a week, with her kids and her busy life, we don't get her that much, just for selfish reasons, so we're literally like, "I think we just made her come live with us for a week," and get a Maya fix. It's going to be really fun, like everybody's really excited that she's coming in.