Olivia Munn on I Don't Know How She Does It, Her Feminist Critics, and Trying to Do it All

Olivia Munn first became known for keeping geeks everywhere enthralled on a daily basis as the co-host of G4’s Attack of the Show, but since leaving the program to pursue acting she’s hit the ground running by joining The Daily Show, starring in the short-lived sitcom Perfect Couples, and snagging roles in upcoming projects from the likes of Aaron Sorkin and Steven Soderbergh. Speaking with Munn over the weekend about her latest film, I Don’t Know How She Does It, Movieline was determined not to ask the pun-tastic question of how, in fact, she does it. What we discovered instead was the story of how, in the course of following her Hollywood dreams, she tried to do it all. “I wanted to be at G4, doing what I was doing, and also be able to pursue acting and other creative outlets,” said Munn, wistfully explaining how she came to part ways with the network that launched her career. “I just wanted to make some other dreams come true.” Munn adds a strong credit to her resume as Momo Hahn, a Type A career-oriented analyst with a severe outlook on life and a bone-dry delivery in the Sarah Jessica Parker vehicle I Don’t Know How She Does It. She spoke with Movieline about her character, battling female stereotypes on and off-screen, being both sexy and smart despite what her critics say (and the infamous backlash to her Daily Show hiring), the frustrations that led to her split from G4, her work on Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, and more. I wanted to make a point not to start by asking you how you do it, because I’m sure you’ve gotten that question a lot already. [Laughs] Yeah, I have! ‘How do you do it all?’ It’s always like, ‘This movie’s called I Don’t Know How She Does It and we watch Sarah Jessica doing that, but you with the movies and the show, how do you do it all?!’ I’m like, well, I don’t have children right now. So how are you going to start it off instead? By asking you how you found you related to the women in this film. I’m 30, I don’t have kids, and so I don’t necessarily relate to Sarah Jessica’s character as much as I do to your character, Momo. So when you first read the script, who did you find yourself relating to most? You know, the only similarity I find between my character and myself is that we’re both hardworking. I actually relate more to Sarah Jessica’s world — not that I’m in it, but it’s something that I would want one day, to be able to have children and a family and also have my work and my career. So my biggest thing was, Momo has a filter, she just chooses not to use it. She has a very structured, very specific outlook on life. That’s why I wanted to cut my hair, too. I wanted there to be nothing that was going to get in her way, even something as trivial as her hair. But she has one goal in life. I think what I loved about the role so much was that I could see how she is perceived, and you want to break down the character in a way that is harder to break down. She’s robotic, and phobic of children. ‘Oh, you want kids one day?’ I get asked that a lot. And it’s more of a rhetorical question. ‘Do you want kids one day? Do you realize that your eggs are literally falling out of you, one by one?’ And I’m like, okay, I’ve picked up on your tone. Thank you for that. Momo starts out as a career woman who doesn’t see the appeal in motherhood but then reveals a surprising maternal instinct. In that, she’s probably the most interesting character in the film. What I love about this is that some people want to put these people in a box; Momo has a very specific view in life. My mother and my aunt, they all went to university and worked really hard and got their degrees and they got married and had children and thought they had to make a choice, one or the other. And our generation, I think that’s what we see when we look at our parents. We’re not going to let family and all that stuff get in the way of our dreams. My mom growing up said to me all the time, one, ‘Don’t get pregnant.’ And ‘don’t do drugs.’ Then the last one was, ‘Never just marry a man and become his wife. Make a name for yourself.’ That’s something that she said to me all the time, and it stuck with me. But here’s the thing; my whole life is work right now. And like you’re saying, you don’t have children and you’re career-oriented, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t want to have kids. Also, if you don’t have kids it doesn’t mean that you picked your career over it. Some people don’t want to have kids. So what I wanted to do with Momo was show someone from that point of view, but also she’s an extreme version of a lot of people that I’ve seen or I’ve heard about. How do you see the women in this film? There are two people: The women who stay at home, or the women who work and have a plan in life and that’s it. But the most important thing for me was to show that if you’re a real human being you’re not just a caricature. A real human being has to be more than just that. The main storyline is, how can a woman be a great mother and a great wife and great at her job at the same time; how do you juggle that? But the B storyline to me is showing that women in different forms can be really horrible to each other, like Busy Phillips’ character, or we can be really supportive of each other if we understand each others’ world like Christina Hendricks, but what I play is that we can be women with two completely different outlooks on life and different agendas, yet be supportive and be friends and love each other and need each other. My choices with Momo, it was always coming from a place of, ‘I’m rooting for you. I’m on your team.’ Sometimes people, and even women, perpetuate this stereotype themselves, not realizing it, wanting to hold each other down. Did that come up during scenes? Sometimes we would be doing a scene and as with any great project, everyone’s really collaborative and talking about it. But one time there was a note for me to be more catty, or to say something that I just said, ‘It doesn’t matter what my delivery is on this, it doesn’t sound supportive. I won’t do it.’ The women that I know in my life, the reality, is that we are really supportive. My two best girlfriends, one’s an architect and one’s a nurse. We couldn’t be more different. Many chick flicks and romantic comedies these days do that as well, it seems. Like Something Borrowed, which actually is about two female friends competing for the same man. It’s a plane movie — you watch it on the plane. [Laughs] But that movie is like a lot of movies, not to just single that one out, where one woman is so oblivious to her best friend’s feelings about somebody else, and on the same token where one woman is so closed off to her best friend about her feelings about somebody else. Then later on when you can go and sleep with your best friend’s fianc… I’m literally like, push her off a bridge! To me, that is real in some women’s worlds. Those are the women who want to, I think, hold back other women who actually want to be more progressive. I think it’s dangerous, and people make the joke, ‘Women dress for other women.’ I’m like, no I don’t! Because one, it’s not 1995, because that joke’s old. And two, I don’t want that girl to want to have sex with me. I want that guy to want to have sex with me, and let’s just call it like it is. And sometimes, I just want to feel good for me. I don’t walk through life dressing up for other women, and I never have. It’s just obnoxious. And we have to be accountable for what we put out there, and I know how lucky we are. In the beginning when you start to do different jobs you’re just thankful to get any kind of work and do it, and people are guiding you, but you have to have a sense of self. How does that translate into your career and how it’s evolved in the last few years? From G4 to now, at what point did you try to start transitioning into acting? From the very beginning. I moved down here in 2003 and was going out for every commercial audition, doing everything I could. I got a small Nickelodeon show right before I went to G4, and they offered me a job and I actually turned it down three or four times. I thought it was a great opportunity but they were like, ‘It’s 9 to 5, Monday through Friday’ — oh no, I have to be able to continue auditioning and all that crap. They were like, what’s good for you is good for us, we want you here and we’ll work it out. I said, great! And for the first six months I dedicated everything, and after that I started auditioning for stuff. I was actually offered a TV pilot but at this point the ratings for Attack of the Show had gone up a lot. They were like, ‘Oh no, you can’t do it.’ I was like, ‘What? You promised me I could!’ ‘Well, we just can’t really afford to have you off our show right now…’ And I wasn’t going to be off, I was going to do them both. But I think the fear there was that I wouldn’t be able to do both. I said OK, I cried, the next one came around a few weeks later and they said, ‘The next one that comes around, we’ll let you do.’ They wouldn’t let me do it. Alright — hold on. You guys promised me this! They said, ‘Well, in good faith…’ Good faith! Good faith, as in their faith. I’m big on loyalty and sticking by my word. So long story short, they worked it out with the lawyers to try and figure it out, but I wanted to be able to live my dream. I wanted to be able to do this, it was a dream of mine, but I also wanted to be able to be creative in other ways. And that’s when I said, I really want to start doing comedic skits. Doing things like comedic acting pieces, and I could put on different characters and make sure the audience was always seeing me in a different character with a different name and being different people, so that when the transition did happen, if I was lucky enough for it to happen, they wouldn’t be like, ‘That’s Olivia!’ The first one we did was ‘It’s hard to be a female superhero’ with Wonder Woman… ‘There’s no pockets for your mirrors and your brush!’ ‘The invisible jet is really hard to find!’ I think that became the calling card for the network, and for myself.

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FEARnet Orders First Original TV Series

EXCLUSIVE: Horror-themed cable channel FEARnet has greenlighted its first original series, Holliston, an offbeat half-hour, multicamera buddy comedy series starring genre filmmakers Adam Green (Hatchet 1 & 2) and Joe Lynch (Knights of Badassdom) The six-episode series, created by Green, is scheduled to start production later this year. It marks the first original production for the linear network. (FEARnet has done original digital series for the Web.) Holliston is expected to join FEARnets Tuesday night "Twisted Comedy" block, a horror-comedy lineup that launched earlier this month with two acquired scripted series, Todd & the Book Of Pure Evil and Psychoville. Set in the town of Holliston, MA, Holliston is described as "Wayne's World meets Saw" and stars Green and Lynch as lesser versions of themselves. They will play Adam and Joe, two friends chasing the dream of becoming successful horror movie filmmakers while struggling to make ends meet and dealing with life and the opposite sex in their post-college jobs at a cable access station where they also host a late night movie program calledThe Movie Crypt. This show has just the right amount of wrong, and you really cant imagine it ever making it on to TV. Thats where FEARnet comes in, said FEARnet president Peter Block. Adam came to us with a truly off-the-wall series that was overflowing with a supporting cast of misfits and I-dont-know-whats, and we knew it was a perfect fit for our Twisted Comedy block. The ensemble cast of the series includes Laura Ortiz (The Hills Have Eyes) and singer Corri English (Unrest), with well-known genre figures expected to make cameos. This is a show built on the memories and real-life experiences of our post-college days, wrapped in a shroud of wrongness, packed full of movie quotes and genre references, and topped off with plenty of jokes at the expense of our real-life friends and industry associates, said Green. No other network would have the guts to make this show; were pushing the boundaries of television. I mean, what other sitcom on television includes exploding heads and an imaginary alien friend who lives in the closet? We plan to really turn the traditional American sitcom on its head. It's the first horror sitcom. A hor-icom!" Holliston is created, written, and directed by Green, with his production company ArieScope Pictures handling the production. Green and Lynch will serve as executive producers along with Cory Neal (Frozen).

TCA: Jane Lynch And Mark Burnett Say 'Glee's Sue Sylvester Will NOT Host Emmys

Diane Haithman is contributing to Deadline's coverage of TCA. Jane Lynch said that executive producer Mark Burnett surprised her on the plane back to L.A. from the TV upfronts in New York earlier this year by asking her to save a place on her dance card to host the 2011 Emmys. Burnett, the reality kingpin behind Survivor and The Voice, told her he didnt have the authority to actually offer her the job, but she said yes on the spot. Lynch, an Emmy winner herself for Glee, has already poked fun at her upcoming hosting roleSept. 18with TV spots in which she admits to saying to producers upon being asked: You know Im not Ellen DeGeneres, dont you? On todays lively panel with Lynch, Burnett and John Shaffner, chairman and CEO of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Lynch said she would be sitting in the writers room throughout the development of the awards telecast (her friend Jill Soloway will be among the writers group). Of live hosting duties, Lynch said she brings the necessary energetic cocktail of excitement, anticipation and fear. And both she and Burnett say that viewers will be seeing Jane Lynch, not a version of her Glee character, no-nonsense coach Sue Sylvester, which Lynch used in her emcee duties at the Fox upfronts the last 2 years. A little Sue Sylvester goes a long way, she said. We will probably leave her track suit on the Paramount lot. She also said she hopes to avoid classic awards show disasters such as Rob LowesSnow White number on the Academy Awards. For his part, first-time Emmy producer Burnett says he will use his reality TV experience to keep the shows pacing clipping right along. The most important thing, [because] the Emmys are three hours long, is pacing, saying there would be a lot of comic bits to keep things moving along. Well, it wasnt intended as a comic bit but Burnett drew a laugh when he said he was going to handle the usually somber In Memoriam section recapping TV celebrity deaths in a different way. It doesnt have to be a bummer, he said quickly de-fusing the guffaws from the audience by saying: It can be a celebration of whats left behindwhen you are gone, we can still enjoy your work. [You can make] different choices in tonalityyou can be sad about it, or uplifted by what they left behind.

TV Rankings: 'Big Brother' Is Wednesday's Greatest-Ranked Program

CBS CBS' Your Government won the evening within the rankings, beating just a number of originals airing on broadcast. The most recent installment from the summer time reality series (6.8 million total audiences, 2.5 rating in grown ups 18-49 demographic) rose 4 % from the last comparable telecast on Wednesday, easily winning the 8 p.m. period of time. Though CBS went repeats of Criminal Minds and CSI after Your Government, the Tiffany network rated second (1.7) behind Fox (1.8) within the key demo. NBC's Minute to Win It (4.7 million, 1.1) dipped 8 percent. America's Got Talent (9.six million, 2.4) hit a season low, sinking 14 % however the competition series still won in the 9 p.m. period of time. Love within the Wild (4.8 million, 1.4) sank 13 percent and it is it's cheapest-ranked telecast up to now. Fox won Wednesday within the key demo using the top six performance show of Which Means You Think You Are Able To Dance (5.4 million, 1.8) despite the fact that it had been lower 14 %. The CW broadcast repeats of America's Next Top Model and ABC went reruns of their comedies in addition to Beyond Belief (5.4 million, 1.3), up 44 percent from a week ago, at 10 p.m. Email: philiana.ng@thr.com TV Rankings

Coldplay Pays Tribute to Amy Winehouse (Video)

During Wednesday night's Coldplay concert at the Los Angeles Tennis Center, which doubled as a benefit for the Grammy Foundation's Grammy in the Schools program and a performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!,singer Chris Martin paid tribute to the late Amy Winehouse by teasing the chorus to her hit "Rehab."our editor recommendsChris Martin's Coldplay Performs New Songs, Classics at Glastonbury (Video)Coldplay apologizes for snub, gives 'Glee' entire catalog STORY: Coldplay to Debut Two New Songs on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' Seated at the piano for a three-song encore, Martin delivered the prophetic line with a hushed voice: "They tried to make me go to rehab and I said no, no, no..." (see video below). The Winehouse moment preceded Coldplay's hit "Fix You," an appropriate preamble considering frontman Martin sings of emotional wounds that feel impossible to heal in the song, which was originally written for his wife Gwyneth Paltrow after the death of her father Bruce in 2002. "Fix You" was followed by the band's latest single, "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall" and capped off the 90-minute show, which debuted several new Coldplay songs including, "Major Minus," "Hurts Like Heaven" and "Charlie Brown." The set also featured some of the band's biggest hits including "Yellow," "In My Place," "Clocks" and "Viva La Vida." Streamers and confetti accented the more high-energy moments as did Kimmel himself, who joked upon taking the stage, "Boy, there are a lot of white people here -- it's unnerving." Martin remarked earlier in the evening that it had been two years since his band last played in L.A. Of Coldplay's new material, he challenged fans to blog about whether they liked the songs or not. See video of Martin's "Rehab" tribute below: Related Topics Jimmy Kimmel Live! Coldplay Amy Winehouse

'Transformers 3' Crosses $1 Billion Worldwide

HOLLYWOOD, CA (August 3, 2011) Worldwide box office receipts for TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON, have hit $1 billion, Paramount Pictures announced today. To date, the third installment of the hit Transformers franchise, and the first shot in 3-D, has grossed $338 million in U.S. (through Monday) and $663 million internationally (through Tuesday). TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON is the first billion dollar grossing movie in the history of Paramount Pictures, marking a substantial milestone in the 99 year life of this legendary studio," said Brad Grey, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Paramount Pictures. We are grateful for the extraordinary work of Michael Bay and his film-making team, executive producer Steven Spielberg, and everyone at Paramount around the globe who played a part in helping make this latest TRANSFORMERS one of the 10 highest grossing films worldwide of all time." Earlier this summer, Paramount was the first studio to reach $1 billion in domestic grosses, aided by the $180.7 million opening of TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON over the July 4th holiday. This is the fifth year in a row that Paramount has reached the milestone before any other studio. Paramount Pictures International crossed the $2 billion mark on July 30th, making it the first for any studio this year to reach the benchmark. The studio has had six consecutive movies earning over $100 million at the domestic box office in 2011. TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON is directed by Michael Bay, written by Ehren Kruger and produced by Don Murphy & Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Ian Bryce. The executive producers are Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, Brian Goldner and Mark Vahradian. When a mysterious event from Earths past erupts into the present day it threatens to bring a war to Earth so big that the Transformers alone will not be able to save us. The movie stars Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Patrick Dempsey, Kevin Dunn, Julie White with John Malkovich and Frances McDormand.

Only for Laffs: Bigger, better, more amusing

TORONTO -- The king of comedy festivals, Only for Laughs Montreal, wrapped its 29th edition Sunday boasting more shows (1,762 British and French combined), more sell-outs, more talent (3,695 artists and participants) and much more tapings for broadcast than previous years.The Gala series offered out four shows -- over 10,000 tickets -- located by Russell Peters.Fest's comedy person of the season, Louis CK, together with Daniel Tosh of Comedy Central's "Tosh." and worldwide funnymen Eddie Izzard and Danny Bhoy were among many hot tickets.Almost 1,000 industryites attended the fest, with 400 executives in the film, TV, digital and live entertainment biz striking the JFL Comedy Conference, having a keynote from Marc Maron along with a Q&An Expert Class with JFL comedy director of the season Paul Feig.Two new groups -- Figures (for sketch artists) and Unrepresented (functions without any agents) -- became a member of fest's New Faces strand, as the sophomore edition from the Associates Series saw several hits including Colin Quinn's Broadway show "Lengthy Story Short" and Funny or Die's "What Are You Doing? With Mike Mitchell."Live comedy podcasts made their first appearance and came capacity auds, but TV cameras were probably the most ubiquitous tech presence.JFL created an archive quantity of recorded TV special offers this season. Montreal roster includes two one-hour "Funny as Hall" special offers for BBC America four one-hour special offers located by John Oliver, Russell Peters, Craig Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet for Canuck pubcaster CBC two one-hrs -- Strange Al's "Amp'd" musical special and JFL live hit "A Tribute to Brainiacs" located by "Large Bang Theory's" Kunal Nayyar and Simon Helberg -- for Canada's The Comedy Network and special offers for GNWTV (Australia), Vital The country, Germany's TBC and Comedy Central channels within the Netherlands and Sweden. Contact the range newsroom at news@variety.com