Most actors would spend hours in the makeup chair to come up with the unflattering look Amy Sedaris sports as Jerri Blank, the 47-year-old ex-con/junkie/prostitute she plays in "Strangers With Candy," the big-screen prequel to her now-defunct cult-favorite TV show.
Sedaris, however, thinks prosthetics are for losers.
"I just slip right into it," says Sedaris of the overbite and hard-knocks-life visage of Jerri, who re-enrolls in high school as a freshman after dropping out at 16. "All my muscles are in my face; that's where they are.
"I always think it's cheating to use prosthetics. . . . If you've gotta rely on that, it's like being on drugs. I might take drugs for recreational uses, but I don't want to be on any of it."
Sedaris, 45, is best known to the masses as the quirky blonde with the pet rabbit and the imaginary boyfriend who's David Letterman's go-to gal when he needs a last-minute substitute guest on the "Late Show." But she has a devoted core of fans from the three 10-episode seasons of "Strangers With Candy" that aired on Comedy Central (1999-2000).
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"I like playing her," says Sedaris.
"I like the audience that she brings, the audience that likes her. She's just a character, and I like playing characters."
Sedaris created the TV series with Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello and Mitch Rouse, friends with whom she'd worked on the sketch-comedy show "Exit 57." Rouse left the others in New York while he relocated to Los Angeles during the early stages of "Strangers," but Sedaris continued to work with fellow Second City alums Colbert and Dinello.
They had moved on from Jerri's world, but they found they couldn't escape it.
"Paul and Stephen and I were working on a book called 'Wigfield,' and we kept coming up with this funny stuff that Jerri Blank would say, just because we'd talk about anything else except the book we were writing," Sedaris says by phone from her Manhattan apartment. "So by the end of the book we had all this funny stuff, and we just thought, 'We should do a movie.' So that's how it happened."
Actually, it wasn't quite that simple. The movie, like the show, is a politically incorrect parody of moralizing 1970s after-school specials, and it wasn't easy to get financing.
"We had a lot of false starts . . . and then I got a call from Worldwide Pants (Letterman's production company) out of the blue," Sedaris says. "I don't even know how they got a script. They said they loved it, and they wanted to give us $3 million to make the movie."
With Dinello directing, the film was shot in 2004, and it screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2005. But before it could get into theaters, it changed distributors and had a few minutes shaved off. Still, Sedaris says they stayed true to the show's spirit.
