When one sees Andy Samberg’s name among the cast of a movie, it’s easy to imagine he’ll be in another hilarious comedy, not one of the best war movies in recent memory. And yet, the actor, who memorably was on Saturday Night Live for seven seasons and the star of Brooklyn Nine-Nine for eight seasons, is right there alongside Kate Winslet in Lee. It’s one of the latest 2024 movie releases that tells the true story of one of the few female war photojournalists during World War II, and Andy Samberg portrays her frequent right hand photographer on the ground.
In Lee, Andy Samberg portrays American photojournalist David Scherman, who was alongside Lee Miller for many WWII assignments. After Samberg talked about being out of his comfort zone in his dramatic role, he shared with CinemaBlend his take on being in that headspace with these words:
If you're not stepping outside of your comfort zone and challenging yourself, then you're at risk of it feeling stale, not just to you, but to people watching. And I think there's a certain element of making movies and television and art of any kind, where if you're not a little bit out on a ledge and pushing things in a direction that doesn't make you a hundred percent comfortable, then it can't grow. So both for you personally and for whatever art form you're working in. For me, I have to feel like I have something to contribute, to engage with it at that level. But, I also do like feeling a little bit outside my comfort zone.
Kate Winslet has shared how Samberg got the role. Apparently, as a Jewish man himself, the SNL actor really wanted the part of David Scherman and “really went for it” in his audition. Winslet called Samberg herself when they decided to cast him, and the first thing he said was “My mom’s gonna be so proud.”
As the movie portrays, Scherman and Miller’s most iconic collaboration happened when they found themselves inside Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich on April 30, 1945 – which is coincidentally the same day the dictator of Nazi Germany died by suicide in Berlin. After the pair of photographers made the realization of where they were, Miller decided to bathe, in what was the first time she’d had hot water on her skin in some time, and posed for the photograph Scherman took. (Check out the photograph in The New Yorker.)
During the filming of Lee, the production had the task of recreating many of the photos Lee Miller took. (In our interview with Kate Winslet, she even told us that she took up film photography with the vintage camera.) While speaking to Samberg, the actor shared what it was like on set when they recreated the image of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub:
Obviously we had all seen that photograph and when we arrived on set that day/night, we went in there and it was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be really good.’ Like, it looked exactly the same. And you know, Kate [Winslet] and Ellen [Kuras] had a real vision and a plan for it, and it is sort of a culminating moment in the film – so we knew it had to be good and have a certain energy, and Kate brought that kind of crackly and tense, but also exciting [energy] and [it felt] like a really nice, you know, F-U to do it. And that part of it was one of the scenes in the movie that I would actually say was fun, even though it was kind of charged.
Lee is a passion project of Kate Winslet’s that she has been working on getting made for almost a decade. The actress, who also served as a producer on the film, enlisted Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s cinematographer Ellen Kuras to make her feature directorial debut and do justice to the photojournalist. The movie is now playing in theaters.
