Following in the footsteps of folks like Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers, Marlon Wayans’ latest movie, Netflix’s Sextuplets, sees the comedy star playing numerous roles… seven, to be precise. Sextuplets follows Wayans’ Alan Daniels, a soon-to-be-father, looking for his birth mother and learning that he has five other siblings all from the same pregnancy who have, shall we say, colorful personalities, and Wayans also plays their mother.
Needless to say that this movie is packed with shenanigans, but as Marlon Wayans (who’s itching to play Plastic Man over in the DC universe) recently told CinemaBlend, his real life family isn’t all that different from the Sextuplets one in terms of the amount of insanity they provide. In Wayans’ words:
The same. All headaches. Your family in real life -- your family is a compilation of various personalities from the same gene pool that all have a different experience. People are like snowflakes, you’re never going to find two identical, like, we’re all so different, we came up in the same house, even if we went to the same schools, it’s just... life has this way of blowing you a different way. When you’re a family, you’re all snow. And so I love my family no matter what, but god, they can get on your damn nerves…
Marlon Wayans is right, every family is different, and while one can definitely love and appreciate their parents, siblings, relatives, etc, there are also times when they can drive you nuts. So while the Sextuplets family has been obviously been sharpened for full comedic effect, as Wayans sees it, there is some resemblance to how his family is in real life.
In case you haven’t read or heard anything about Sextuplets, the story really kicks off when Alan Daniels meets his first long-lost sibling, Russell. From there, they embark on a road trip to meet their other brothers and sisters, including stripper Dawn, hustler Ethan, the red-haired and lighter-skinned Jasper, and the infantile “Baby Pete.”
It was no easy feat for Marlon Wayans to play seven characters in Sextuplets. Director Michael Tiddes previously told CinemaBlend that the performer would get to work at 2 a.m., be in makeup for seven hours and the work anywhere from 12-15 hours. Many scenes were also shot multiple times over several days due to using motion control to make sure that it looked like Wayans’ characters were in the same room with one another. Tiddes previously worked with Wayans on the Haunted House films, Fifty Shades of Black and Naked.
Along with Marlon Wayans filling out all those roles (with Spiral Jackson serving as a body double for Russell), Sextuplets’ cast includes Bresha Webb, Molly Shannon, Glynn Turman, Michael Ian Black, Debbi Morgan, Grace Junot, Robert Pralgo, Jason Graham and Jwaundace Candece.
Sextuplets is playing on Netflix now, and be sure to read CinemaBlend’s review of the movie. For those of you interested in what’s opening on the big screen for the rest of the year, look through our 2019 release schedule. Marlon Wayans will next appear in the A24, Sopia Coppola-directed movie On the Rocks.
