“Four Weddings and a Funeral” fans looking forward to Mindy Kaling’s adaptation of the beloved ’90s rom-com starring Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant should know how the Hulu miniseries will be different from the film — and how it won’t.
Here to explain it to you is star Rebecca Rittenhouse, who plays Ainsley on the streaming service’s small-screen update of “Four Weddings,” who told TheWrap the show will follow the basic structure of the 1994 movie.
“Well, the TV adaptation is really a reimagining of the original and the characters are not exactly parallel and ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ is really used as a structure,” Rittenhouse told TheWrap in the above interview. “So it’s about four American friends living in London and over the course of their story, four weddings and a funeral happen. So it’s really just about friendship, love and big life events.”
Like Rittenhouse said, the show will follow four American friends — Maya (Nathalie Emmanuel), Craig (Brandon Mychal Smith), Ainsley (Rittenhouse) and Duffy (John Reynolds) — who reunite for a London wedding, but must weather a tumultuous year of romance and heartbreak after a bombshell at the altar throws their lives into turmoil.
As for how Kaling has made the story her own, Rittenhouse says the creator followed the same sense of humor she is known for using on her previous series “The Mindy Project” and in her recently-released film “Late Night.”
“All the comedy is sort of her style,” Rittenhouse said. “She loves to make a lot of pop culture references, but she also loves literature and so I think she marries those two things really well.”
MacDowell will appear on the series as Ainsley’s mother — not Carrie, the role she played in the film — a cameo that Rittenhouse is very excited about.
“Yes, she plays my mother. She makes a really nice cameo as my Texan mother. She does not play her character from ‘Four Weddings,’ but it’s a nice little homage to that.”
Speaking of Ainsley, Rittenhouse says the part is probably her favorite of all the characters she’s ever played, who she describes as “a very, very fun, effervescent, vibrant” woman and “probably sometimes annoying to her friends because she’s in their business. ”
Watch the full interview above.
“Four Weddings and a Funeral” launches July 31 on Hulu.