Put “Never Goin’ Back” stars Camila Morrone and Maia Mitchell in a kitchen with TheWrap’s Beatrice Verhoeven to make pancakes in honor of the movie, and you’ll get bland, deformed flapjacks and a whole lot of laughter.
“There’s a particular scene in the film where we may or may not be under the influence of a certain natural drug, and we are at work and we see pancakes,” Mitchell explained while mixing the batter.
“Never Goin’ Back,” in limited release now, stars the two actresses as best friends, who in order to take a birthday trip to the beach try to take up more shifts at work, but everything — and we mean, everything — goes wrong in the process.
The film first premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in January but wrapped production exactly one year ago, and both actresses miss how easygoing it was on set.
“I miss being a little ratchet,” Mitchell said. “We didn’t have to look good, there was no pressure to, like, keep your makeup looking good — we were supposed to be sweaty and a hot mess… We weren’t sleeping a lot, so we naturally had a glow of exhaustion about us that was helpful. I wasn’t washing my hair, we had a makeup artist who did the runny make-up on us and helped with sweat.”
Laughing, Morrone added, “It was pretty natural — the sweat, for me at least, was very natural.”
The girls go through a lot in the film, which was written and directed by Augustine Frizzell. And in one particular scene, Morrone’s character, Jessie, has a major emergency while being locked in a closet, which, she said, pushed her out of her comfort zone.
“Now I can s— in a bucket in any movie,” she said about the scene. “I am a really raunchy and outgoing person, but I read the script and I asked my agents, ‘What do we think about this scene? Maybe we can rewrite it so I don’t have to do that?’ … Now that I did that, I can basically do anything.”
Raunchiness and vulgarity aside, Mitchell and Morrone actually learned a lot from the movie about the power of female friendship.
“There are crazy things that happen to these girls, but at the end of the day, they are best friends and nothing comes between us. And it’s a very strong, empowering story about female friendship… and that’s a positive thing for young women to see,” said Mitchell.
Plus, says Morrone, “you get to see us looking like disasters and making a fool out of ourselves.”
And while the two have developed a strong friendship on and off the screen, they can’t seem to agree on whether the pancakes were a success or not. Especially because Mitchell’s miniature pancakes looked “blue” because they were so raw.
“Marry us!” Morrone joked. “We’ll clean your home, we’ll cook you breakfast… we do everything!”
Added Morrone: “We look so stupid, you guys… Nothing has ever tasted more bland.”
“I think these are great,” Mitchell countered.
Watch the video above.