Melissa McCarthy doesn’t want her kids to watch the ‘The Happytime Murders’ until they’re 40.
The premise of the movie is that puppets actually exist but are considered to be inferior citizens to humans and the 47-year-old actress plays sugar addicted cop Detective Connie Edwards who along with private investigator puppet Phil Phillips – voiced by Bill Baretta – must scour Los Angeles looking for a puppet murderer.
Despite its puppet cast the comedy-crime film is R-rated and Melissa insists her daughters, Vivian, 11, and Georgie, eight, have zero chance of watching the adult themed movie.
The comedian – who has her kids with her husband Ben Falcone – said: "It’s definitely a grown-up movie. My kids are like, ‘We can’t wait to see this!’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t wait to show you, when you’re 40! It will be so wonderful, when you’re 110 and you can see this!’
"I think it’s part of the fun of it. Somebody was saying that there’s always that thing, when you watch something from The Muppets, one of the movies, or Sesame Street, that when the lights go off, somebody says cut, and they walk out the back door, you wonder if they go into the real world and have a life? This is really seeing behind the curtain. When the lights are off and they’re not having to perform for people, you see the real grind of their lives, and there’s something really cool about it.
"There’s a weird, edgy coolness, and it’s really funny."
A lot of the comedy in the film – which has been made with The Jim Henson Company, responsible for creating The Muppets – is improvised, and Melissa has reminisced on the fun she had with the people playing the puppets while shooting the movie.
She said: "They’re crazy! They’re crazy funny! All of them improvise. You can throw anything at them. Every time Drew [Massey], who plays several things in this, did a take, it was completely different, which both delighted and irritated me.
"I was like, ‘Is this written down?! I really work on this, and I think you might just be saying stuff, off the top of your head.’ And each one was super specific, really funny and completely different."
Melissa McCarthy’s kids banned from watching puppet movie
