LOS ANGELES — Can Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates wrestle the wedding comedy mantle from Wedding Crashers?
Eleven years after the latter arrived in theaters, Zac Efron and Adam Devine are up for the challenge.
“The older we get, the more we go to," says Efron, 28, who calls weddings ripe for comedy. "And inevitably, you’re forced into these scenarios that are funny and awkward.”
In Mike and Dave (in theaters Friday), the actor plays Dave, one of two hell-raising brothers implored by their father to bring "nice girls" to their sister’s upcoming wedding in Hawaii. So he and his brother Mike (Devine) do what any nice young men would do: They advertise for dates on Craigslist.
But unlike Wedding Crashers' antics, which focused on two womanizers (Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn) bedding countless bridesmaids, Mike and Dave's story is "a four-hander, and really the girls are the driving force,” says Devine. Plus, it has roots in reality.
In 2013, the real Mike and Dave — Mike Stangle, now 27, and Dave Stangle, 31 — were implored by their family not to ruin an upcoming wedding, and so they placed an ad seeking wedding dates on Craigslist. The post went viral, landing the brothers on the Today show; a book, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates: And A Thousand Cocktails, followed.
"We had something like 6,000 or 7,000 responses," says Dave Stangle, who lives in New York and works for BarkBox. "We would find the ones that seemed the most entertaining, the crazier ones. And we sort of bit off way more than we could chew there."
That’s where Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza come in. In the film, the actresses play Alice and Tatiana, who are composites of the more, say, daring women the real guys met (Tatiana fakes that she's a teacher; Alice packs Ecstasy in her bra).
The characters are “all like my friends, who kind of don’t want to grow up and are still trying to party every day and have the most fun they can before they have to get real adult jobs,” Devine says.
In the movie, “they make us look a little bit better than we were,” says Mike Stangle, a bartender in New York. “Dave and I were really just getting fall-down drunk with each other and making jokes and the women who’d go on these (introductory) dates with us would just be horrified.”
Mike and Dave, a heightened version of events, is “incredibly accurate right up until Zac takes his shirt off,” jokes Dave Stangle. (In real life, the brothers ended up taking friends to the wedding — which was in Saratoga, N.Y., not Hawaii.)
At the end of the day, this cast is pro-nuptials. “I actually really like being in weddings,” Devine says. Plaza nods: “As long as you don’t have any real responsibilities," she deadpans.
Efron grins at a memory from his best friend’s Jewish wedding, where he helped out with the hora. Bending down to grasp the legs of a chair, Efron looked up "and I was like, we’ve got Grandma?!" Efron shakes his head, remembering two guys "smaller than me” helping carry her.
“I’m like, you should hold on! I was so afraid I was going to drop Grandma. But we didn’t.”
