When I meet Amy Schumer, she has been married for exactly one month and is working on a joke about her husband’s penis. Something along the lines of, my husband is uncircumcised – for now. She had jotted it down on the Notes app on her iPhone, where she keeps a lot of ideas, but it duplicated the note five times “so now it looks like I really have plans to mutilate him,” she says.
She then admits that she actually first used that line about another man she used to date, “but you have to update it so it’s about the person you’re with now. And really, my husband is good, he can keep everything he has. At this point in my life, I’m cool with foreskin or not – God bless everyone and their penii,” she says, breezily, as if she might have exhausted herself by creating a persona who is supposed to care so much.
Amy Schumer is a conundrum. A native New Yorker, she made her incredibly successful name doing stand-up comedy about raw, rude sex and all of its discontents, about dating and dirtiness and blacking out drunk and doing the walk of shame home. Her TV sketch show, Inside Amy Schumer, ran for four series on Comedy Central and often mercilessly skewered the gender hypocrisy of what our culture allows men and women to do, in particular the beauty myths that silently surround women, in sketches such as “Girl You Don’t Need Makeup” and “Her Last Fuckable Day”.
At the Glamour awards in London in 2015, after various female celebrities had tottered up to the stage to receive awards in heels they could barely walk in and dresses they could barely breathe in, Schumer strode on. “I’m probably 160lb right now,” she said, looking out over the audience with disdain, “and I can catch a dick whenever I want. That’s the truth.” I was there; she changed the mood of the room from faux modesty to explosive, spluttering laughter, and all the disdained women ran up to her afterwards, desperate to be her friend. It felt like a tipping point in that industry; famous women have been letting their guard down ever since.
Yet a couple of months later, her debut movie Trainwreck came out, which she wrote and starred in. It began promisingly and originally, but ended with her character giving up her competitive career and literally becoming a cheerleader – an actual cheerleader – for her clever, high-achieving man. The next year Schumer published her autobiography, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, in which, alongside stories of a childhood going from riches to rags on Long Island with her dad’s dodgy business skills and then illness, and both her parents’ philandering, she wrote that, actually, she had only ever had a one-night stand once, and it was lovely and respectful, thank you very much.
Now she has made I Feel Pretty, a film about a woman who gets a bash on the head and wrongly believes herself to have become as beautiful as a supermodel, and so creates a whole new life for her sexy self. The film asks if beauty is a state of mind – while also involving Schumeresque motifs such as a vaginal injury on an exercise bike.
Meanwhile, Schumer has surprised the gossip papers by suddenly getting married, to a chef called Chris Fischer, in a lacy white wedding dress on a clifftop in Malibu. For celebrities, this is as traditional as your father walking you down the aisle in your village church. Coverage of the wedding made it all sound rather giddy and impulsive, but when I ask her about it, she is anything but.
“I feel exactly the same as before I was married – but I’m psyched. I love him,” she says, her face deadly serious, like she’s been through a thing or two in this life. “Like, I’m fucking – it feels like having a partner. It feels like not being alone.” We are sitting in a rather fancy hotel suite overlooking Central Park, where Schumer is promoting her new movie. Her bodyguard is in the next room, along with two assistants who have taken Schumer’s tiny black poodle Tatiana, who was barking too much for the interview. “He’s 38, I’m 36, so, you know, we are not completing each other. We already are who we are and just want to support and encourage each other. And so I’m psyched that I don’t have to be zipping up my knee boots, leaving someone’s apartment at 3am. I’m done.” She says this wasn’t like other relationships, “where you’re like, come on, pleeease meet my parents. I can’t believe I dealt with any of that bullshit before! This was like, oh my God I fucking love this person, and I admire him, and we’re a team and he was ready.”
I ask her if it is hard, having created such a bold sexual persona, ever to find the space to feel shy, but she looks baffled by that question and says that she isn’t ever shy. In fact, she looks baffled by quite a few of my questions: interviews are clearly not her favourite thing. I want to discuss her work being about the concept of fuckability, but she says that that’s not accurate, and turns her nose up a bit.
She says this film is about her character Renee simply wanting to be seen, and though there’s a boyfriend angle, “I don’t think of this movie as a love story. It’s about her and her friends.” She says the dressing-up is for other women, because she has learned, with age, that we don’t really dress for men. “In my experience, men are not that psyched and the guys that I’m attracted to aren’t the guys who are like, ‘Oh, is that the new Givenchy line?’ I think, her thing is about confidence and about feeling attractive.”
Well, yes and no. I mean if it’s all about women, then her character entering a bikini competition and shaking her stuff all over the stage in a dive bar full of men does seem an interesting move. Yet the thing about the bikini scene is – it becomes lovely. You start watching it behind your hands, cringing – and by the end you’re charmed by the sight of someone just thoroughly, unabashedly enjoying herself.
Schumer is glad I liked that scene, and says she fought for it. She was supposed to just stand there, “but I said no, I’m going to go nuts on stage, I’m going to dump water on myself, do the whole thing. And I seriously fought everybody and I’m so glad I did.” She also has a sex scene, and fought to be allowed to reveal more flesh but still have the film rated 13. “I think we should see more, you know, and I’m not letting them retouch any of me in the movie.”
There is an idiosyncratic, pioneering power to Schumer’s comedy work that I keep looking for in her films. They veer towards slapstick whereas her solo material has brains and guts. I do not make myself popular by suggesting this, and Schumer bristles when I ask what sort of movies she would make if there was no financial compulsion for feelgood endings.
“You know, I said no to a movie where I would have made five times this amount of money,” she says. Really? Someone else’s project? “Mmm,” she replies, mysteriously. “For me, it’s not so much about the money. Like, I wouldn’t want to spend three years of my life working on The Revenant. I filmed a drama two years ago and it was a bummer. I don’t want to show people what I can do – I just want to do stuff that will make people feel better.”
Hot women, once the butt of her jokes, now get cast in her films. I Feel Pretty co-stars Emily Ratajkowski, who rose to fame dancing topless in the Blurred Lines music video, and also features a cameo from Naomi Campbell. “I did a lot of press yesterday sitting next to Emily and I think that probably would have been kind of hard for me 10 years ago,” she admits. They were wearing similar clothes, “and I would have made a joke about it before – but now it’s just – I just feel like that’s over. I kind of feel done with the self-ranking thing.”
She says this comes from growing up and realising that she feels most beautiful when she’s away with her girls, or on a night out where she’s just “so happy, so comfortable, you know who you are. And then it’s like, well, why can’t we just feel like that all the time?” One of those girls is her best buddy Jennifer Lawrence. “I texted her yesterday and I was like, ‘I did an interview today and I told them you were really hideous up close.’ And she wrote, ‘Actual LOL’, and then she added in parenthesis ‘(Because I’m so pretty, you know?)’ And I was like, ‘Exactly.’” I ask about their shared sense of humour. “Well, Jen’s quick. She picks up on things that I just mutter to make myself laugh. I’ll just say something under my breath, and she’ll be like, ‘I heard that.’”
Speaking of comic actors, Michelle Williams is an absolute revelation in I Feel Pretty. It’s perhaps the biggest shock of the film. “Me too,” says Schumer. “I didn’t know she was really funny. Like she’s really funny. Why didn’t we know? It’s because they always put her in some awful thing where she’s got to be on the floor, crying.”
As for the #MeToo movement, Schumer wholly supports it but isn’t jumping up and down whooping about it “because, while it’s exciting, it’s also really triggering and upsetting. It makes everybody feel super vulnerable. But to think that this generation is going to say, ‘This isn’t acceptable,’ and not just bury the things that our mothers buried – that feels really good. It feels like, across the board, we’re getting closer to equality. Which is – it’s such a gut-wrenching thing to even have to say that.”
She must have seen a few of her own male colleagues in comedy go down. “Right, there are people you love that can have really shitty behaviour that needs to be called out. And then there are so many men who are just scared, they’re just waiting for the phone to ring, they’re waiting to open their computer and see their faces and it’s a frightening time for them. But then we’re going, ‘We’ve been frightened our whole lives.’”
As for the future, Schumer continues to campaign for gun control, aided by her distant cousin the US senator Chuck Schumer, and to call out certain other senators and their links to the NRA. It’s a subject even closer to her heart after two young women were shot in an American cinema while watching her movie Trainwreck. The day we meet, schoolkids are pouring out of their classrooms across the USA to demonstrate, “and I think once I start looking at that news footage I’ll just be crying all day,” she says. We discuss the Florida survivors, such as Emma Gonzalez. “These kids are really making an impact and I feel more hopeful right now than I thought possible,” she says. “This has been more movement than I thought that I would see in my lifetime. I think what they’re just realising is that the adults are not actually in control.”
It’s also time for a change in Schumer’s own life. I ask about a typical day for her and she says that for the past 10 years, from the moment she woke up till she went to sleep, “I was driven and working and writing. Doing stand-up, you know, promoting something or filming something. I would say that, for 15 years, I was getting up at seven, going boxing, showering, going to the writer’s room all day, and having an interview during lunch. Afterward, maybe getting some sort of acupuncture before going and doing stand-up, and then having, like, 90 minutes when I could write when I got home. You know? That’s been it. I’ve been hustling for so long, I want to take care of myself now. I got really sick and it just made me realise I wasn’t invincible. I need to slow down.”
One last thing though – can we just clear up the one-night-stand thing? Do you really mean you only had sex within relationships? “No! See to me, a one-night stand is where you meet someone that same day, you have sex with them, and then you never see them again. Sleeping with a friend or having sex with someone you know just once, no, I don’t consider that a one-night stand. I should make an addendum to that book. Something else I realised: I wrote that I don’t like watercress in the book. But I meant water chestnuts. So I need to publish two corrections, I guess.”
I Feel Pretty is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 4 May
