Ron’s Gone Wrong has the voice talents of Shazam!’s Jack Dylan Grazer with The Hangover’s Zach Galifianakis teaming up to play a middle schooler and malfunctioning robot in this weekend’s latest family film. These days, animated films are often recorded across the world by its actors with few moments for actual one-on-one time in the sound booth. Thankfully, the comedic and naturally charismatic actors came together for a specific scene in the sci-fi movie.
CinemaBlend spoke to two of the Ron’s Gone Wrong filmmakers about the process of cultivating the unlikely friendship between down-on-his-luck kid Barney (Grazer) and a B-bot (Galifianakis) that does not work the way it’s intended. Co-directors Jean-Phillippe Vine and Octavio E. Rodriguez shared one specific moment working with the actors that they’ll never forget. In Vine’s words:
There’s an argument between Ron and Barney, which we deliberately got Zach and Jack in the booth and got them to fight it out and improvise the scene and because they are so dysfunctional as a relationship at that point, the comedy just came out of it and we essentially just took that and animated what they gave us because it was just awesome and something you cannot really put on the page, it had to come through the rhythm between them.
The scene they’re referring to takes place later in the film when Barney and Ron are on the run by the company that made the malfunctioning B-bot and doesn’t want the bad press. It speaks to the pair’s friendship and the messages of the film. When speaking to Zach Galifianakis about voicing the robot who has tons of hilarious moments by the way, he shared his experience voicing the character alongside Jack Dylan Grazer:
It’s weird because you don’t know the person, just like with anything else you’re working on, you have to act like you know them and are getting to know them. The good thing about this movie is that the characters were getting to know each other too, it wasn’t as if they had a history. So that helped out a little bit. It’s always advantageous for me to [share the booth] with me and then they ask me not to do it ever again with me and that’s the sad part of it all.
Towards the end there, Zach Galifianakis got into his typical self-deprecating humor, which Jack Dylan Grazer played along with, jokingly saying that he didn’t want to work with him either after sharing the same space for the fight scene. Then, of course, Grazer played around a little more, improvising that their time together was truly a physical moment in the sound booth:
We got into a huge fight, I punched him right through the jaw. Followed through with a knee to the chin.
Zach Galifianakis kept it going, sharing it was on the DVD extras before Jack Dylan Grazer went bigger, saying there was a "stunt man" in the booth as well, along with a violent bullwhip. You can watch the pair talk about the scene in the interview clip above. Galifianakis kept the funny bit going with these words:
One day we’ll discuss. They’ll be a book about all this about all the physical fights we got into. I can’t talk about it because I’m a 52 year old man and he was 13 when he started working on this movie.
Ron’s Gone Wrong imagines a world where walking and talking forms of smartphones called B-bots become a hot ticket item for kids. Jack Dylan Grazer’s Barney is the last one in his school to get one, and as he learns, he’s been paired with one, called Ron, that was never connected to the algorithm or cloud. Ron and Barney become friends in a more organic way, but in the process they stir up chaos in their town.
Ron’s Gone Wrong is now playing in theaters. You can check out what other movies are coming out through the rest of the year with CinemaBlend’s 2021 new movie release schedule.
