By C.G. Hilliard
Character actress Alanna Ubach has displayed her talents in the wide range of roles she has portrayed over the years. She played Marcia’s gal-pal with lesbo leanings in The Brady Bunch Movie, showed up as Whoopi Goldberg’s wisecracking student of in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, and she was bitchy and bushy-beavered waitress Naomi in the raunchy 2005 comedy Waiting...
Now Alanna is reprising her role in the sequel Still Waiting and she recently sat down to talk to C.G. Hilliard about her new movie, body doubles, and Summer Lovers.
Tell us about your character Naomi in the Waiting movies.
Well, it’s funny. She’s angrier than ever, but she’s been promoted to hostess. And now she actually gets to wear a nice dress, and her hair is straightened and grown out a little, and she has to be nice to the old folks and the babies and the garbage men and the couples who come in.
She wants to be a waitress again, but John Michael Higgins, the new manager, won’t let her. So she goes across the street to Ta-Ta’s Wing Shack, where this new Hooters-type restaurant has opened up and it’s giving us a run for our money. So she goes for a job interview and they won’t give it to her and she’s just so fucking pissed off and decides to basically sabotage their business.
Have you ever actually worked in a restaurant?
I’ve never actually worked in a restaurant before. I have a lot of friends who have worked in restaurants and they say it’s not a very pretty environment.
I remember TGI Friday’s was a really big thing in Simi Valley and ever Friday kids would go down to TGI Fridays.
When I was kid it was The Red Onion. My sister, who’s eleven years older than me, would go down there to dance to Billy Ocean and get picked up by the 714 guys.
But now I guess there’s Bennigans and Islands and all those freaking places.
Did you visit those places to research your role?
No I didn’t. You just have to delve down deep inside. You know, everyone’s pissed off at the end of the day and I have a lot of anger. It was very therapeutic to say, “Be angry? Ha ha! That is easy!”
You’ve been in a lot of teen comedies, did you watch those kinds of movies growing up?
I sure did. I was a big huge John Hughes ho. I love John Hughes. Sixteen Candles I have basically memorized by heart. I was in love with Molly Ringwald and Jake Ryan [Michael Schoeffling]. I don’t even know the actor’s real name. And Long Duk Dong [Gedde Watanabe]. Long Duk Dong made me want to be a character actor.
Really?
Oh God, yes! You walk away from the movie thinking about Long Duk Dong! And he just seems like such a fun person to hang out with anyway. If you’re having a bad day, you think about Long Duk Dong and his performance and you just laugh. So I though, “I want to be a character actor.” And Pee-wee Herman.
As a chracter actor, is comedy your favorite genre of movie to work in?
Oh, it’s so much fun. Comedy is the best. There’s just endless amounts of things that you can make fun of. I grew up in Downey in a two-story house overlooking the freeway. On the weekends, you did whatever you could to have fun and having fun for us was toilet-papering people. Vandalism, stuff like that.
So what it’s like to be from a small town and having to think of ways to have fun. You have to be creative.
Can you talk about the scene in Waiting... when a body double portraying your character is shown wearing a merkin [pubic wig] over your crotch?
It’s so funny because they went to every single girl asking if she would show her vagina. And everyone said no. But I said, “Absolutely. But it’s got to be the ugliest vagina you’ve ever seen. I want cottage cheese coming out of it and paper clips hanging from it. And they were like, “You got it.”
So they hired some stripper from across the street to be the one whose vagina they put the Merkin on and she was fine with it. They did a close-up shot of her and it was hilarious.
Were you on the set when they did the scene?
I was but it was a closed set so I couldn’t even see it. It was funny.
So the other actresses wouldn’t show their vaginas even though the scene was going to be shot with a body double who wouldn’t even be showing her real vagina?
Exactly. Anna Faris said she already did a crotch shot in that Wayans brothers movie and she said, “Oh no, I can’t do that again, I already did it.”
Then they went to Kaitlin Doubleday and she said, “Are you out of your fucking mind? I’m not going to show my vagina on camera!”
And they went to Vanessa Lengies and she was like, “No, I’m too young for that.” And that was it.
They went to me and there you go. I said, “Sure. Absolutely. I’ll do it.”
And then you didn’t even have to do it.
Yes, great! It was awesome. I just pretending like I was doing it and they shot me with a medium long shot and then cut back to the stripper’s vadge. Funny.
Who’s your favorite actress working today?
I would say Charlize Theron because that’s a girl that can do a lot of things. Even in Monster, I still wanted to have sex with her. If I was a guy I’d be stalking her. For sure.
I love to hate Cameron Diaz. And who’s the girl from Hairspray [Nikki Blonsky]? She’s adorable. Sarah Silverman is kind of cutting edge, she’s cool. And Kathy Griffin takes the cake just because she’s so fucking smart.
Do you remember the first nude scene you ever saw?
Yes, it was The Blue Lagoon. That was really something for me. I remember seeing The Blue Lagoon and thinking, “Wow. Brooke Shields has boobies.” It was so funny.
When I first saw it I was like, “That’s Athena!” Because I had only ever seen one girl naked before and that was my sister Athena, who’s eleven years older than me so she was Brooke Shields’ age at the time. I couldn’t understand that that was someone else.
The other guy, Christopher Atkins, I couldn’t even comprehend what the hell was between his legs.
Did you see it in the theater?
I did. It was funny because my Mom and Dad were seeing The Blue Lagoon and they wanted us to see the kids’ movie in the other theater. My friend and I started getting bored so we snuck into The Blue Lagoon and watched it in the back row while my parents were watching it in the front row. They had no idea we were there.
Also Halloween, where the girl shows her boobs. A lot of the slasher flicks, those were the first nude scenes I saw.
Do you have a favorite nude scene?
Out of all of them, I’d have to say Summer Lovers, baby. Peter Gallagher in Summer Lovers. I’d like to Peter his Gallagher.
Summer Lovers is a classic.
Yes, it’s a classic. I just love it. He was having sex with these two girls and they were in Greece and they were all so beautiful. Hot.
And I like my brunettes.
Would you ever do a nude scene?
Oh absolutely I would. But it better be on HBO or Showtime or some fucking Martin Scorsese movie. I’ll show it all, man: tonsils, everything, you name it. But it better be some Merchant Ivory movie.
But you use a body double in Still Waiting, right?
Yeah, I do. My boobs weren’t big enough and they weren’t cartoony enough. I’ve got a 32C and they wanted some real cartoony circus boobies.
And it was really fun because I got to audition all these tits!
We were sitting in the trailer and the girls came in and they weren’t wearing a bra and we’d say, “1-2-3!,” and they’d lift up their shirts and we’d go, “OK, thank you.”
And I think the fourth one had these ginormous boobs and I remember [director] Rob McKittrick saying, “OK, that’s the one!” So we got the cartoon-tit chick.
But you didn’t get to pick out your body double in the first movie.
No, not in the first one. But this time they wanted a girl to be there so they wouldn’t seem like such perverted idiots, sitting in there watching a bunch of boobs.
Girls are so sweet! They were all so cute and they were all so nervous. They were so new and fresh off the bus from Tennessee.
What’s next on the horizon for you?
I’ve got a couple of things coming up. I’m doing this cartoon movie with Gore Verbinski directing. He and Johnny Depp got together and made this movie about a household pet who gets lost in the desert and tries to find himself. I do voices for a bunch of different animals.
Johnny Depp is in it and Isla Fisher, Beth Grant, Alfred Molina, Harry Dean Stantonall these great character actors. We just wrapped.
And I might be up for something for HBO, so cross your fingers, for God’s sake.
Is there anything else you want to tell us?
Yes. Check out Still Waiting on DVD February 17th. Buy it, I need the residual money. It’s a fucking recession.
