Posted in: Amazon MGM Studios, Exclusive, Interview, Movies | Tagged: Jacob Scipio, Katy O'Brien, Madelaine Petsch, Maintenance Required

Maintenance Required Stars Talk Automotive Rom-Com's Underdog Themes

Maintenance Required stars Madelaine Petsch, Jacob Scipio, Katy O'Brian, Madison Bailey, and Matteo Lane spoke to us about the MGM rom-com.

Maintenance Required is not your atypical romantic comedy from director Lacey Uhlemeyer in her second feature and her first as a writer, co-writing with Erin Falconer and Roo Berry, which follows Charlie (Madelaine Petsch), the fiercely independent owner of an all-female mechanic shop, who is forced to reevaluate her future when a flashy corporate competitor moves in across the street. Seeking comfort, she turns to an anonymous online confidant – unaware she's confiding in Beau (Jacob Scipio), the very rival threatening her business. As sparks fly both online and off, the truth threatens to blow everything apart. Petsch, Scipio, and co-stars Katy O'Brian (Kam), Madison Bailey (Izzy), and Matteo Lane (Jordan) spoke to Bleeding Cool about working with Uhlemeyer and Falconer, their script, and flexibility as creatives, their familiarity with the auto industry, and the bonds they formed as their characters and how it expanded to their real friendships.

Maintenance Required: Stars Petsch, Scipio, O'Brian, Bailey & Lane on Rom-Com and Automotive Underdog Story

What did you like about working with Lacey as a creative?

Scipio: Lacey is awesome, she's great. She wrote this thing with Erin Falconer, and we had a lot of fun. She created a really cool environment.

Petsch: Very collaborative.

O'Brian: It was her first time directing a full feature, so it was a fun process for all of us to like collab together, working through trial and error, and figure stuff out, but she's very silly, and I could always tell when I landed a joke, because she'd be laughing super loud, then we'd have to stop for sound and do it again.

What would you like about the underdog themes of their script?

Petsch: It's a tale as old as time, especially in the world we're living in right now, where big business is taking out these tiny little shops left, right, and center, even in LA. To bring that to the screen is important, and it's also an authentic story.

Lane: Erin was great. She and I got a couple of meals with each other and chatted. She's from Montreal, and she was very funny. It was nice to see their sort of dynamic duo come together, and then us collaborate with them, and they were always on set, and if there was something where I was like, "Oh, could this be funny? Would that be funny?" I would run it by Erin or Lacey, and they were very chill, making it feel easy and fun.

Bailey: They were super receptive to what we had to bring to the table, then confident that we understood our characters, and believed we were funny [laughs], loosen the reins.

Did you have any familiarity with the auto industry? Was there any prep you needed for your roles?

Scipio: Well, my uncle owned a garage, and I used to hang out there when I was a kid quite a lot. I had early memories of a lot of grease, being under cars, and the smell of oil. Yeah, man, it was a big part of my childhood.

Bailey: I mean, I do drive [O'Brian and Lane laugh]. My car starts, and it stops.

O'Brian: They did like little brief lessons with me to do like metal grinding and welding.

Lane: Really? That's cool

O'Brian: Yeah, and then we did tire changes, and I learned a little bit about the inside of the car, but 99 percent of the movie we're not doing anything with the cars. So we could get away with that base knowledge.

Lane: Absolutely, I also live in New York. I don't have a car. [Bailey laughs].

O'Brian: I did try to do the nails one day, though, because we had some time in the nail salon, and I was trying to make a bedazzled nail, and it was awful. I don't even remember how bad it was. I hope you don't.

Bailey: The respect I gained for my nail tech after failing, and just like…

Lane: Honestly, it was great, because they would be filming something else, and you were in there doing your nails. It was like…

Bailey: We were dilly-dallying.

Lane: …legit killing it. I was like, "What?" because you wait a long time on set [O'Brian and Bailey laugh].

Madelaine, Madison, Katy, what was it like working on your chemistry as you were developing as your characters Charlie, Izzy, and Kam? Did you find out you guys had anything in common while bonding, while developing it?

Petsch: Turns out we all love escape rooms. We did a lot of those in Leeds [England].

Bailey: I feel like we connected very naturally. I mean, the girls are sweethearts and we had a lot of fun.

O'Brian: They made me do TikToks [Lane laughs]. That's true, and then I tried to do my own TikTok and I was like, "I can't do this" [Bailey laughs], so I learned not only are they exceptionally skilled at those things, but that it's not a life that I'm meant to do, it's stressful. We were running a tight ship with TikTok. Yeah, it was like intense.

Bailey: The dances.

Jacob, what did you like working with Jim Gaffigan?

Scipio: Jim Gaffigan's awesome, man. He's very funny. Total pro. Hilarious guy. Very hard to do scenes with him and keep a straight face.

Matteo, how did you develop your rapport as your character, Jordan, with Jacob's Beau?

Lane: We first got dinner with each other before we filmed. We got there before everybody. It was just Jacob, Madeline, and me, and we were on set at first, so we did a lot of our scenes. It was just us with dinner afterwards, hanging out, getting lunch, and then it turned into a real friendship, and they let us improvise a lot with our lines. It all happened at the same time, like a natural chemistry on screen from a natural chemistry in life.

Amazon MGM Studios' Maintenance Required, which also stars Inanna Sarkis, is now playing on Prime Video.

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