How Amy Schumer Lured Goldie Hawn Out of Retirement

Amy Schumer is as persuasive as she is persistent.

The Emmy-winning actress is currently on location in Hawaii filming adventure-comedy with none other than Goldie Hawn—an actress who hadn’t made a movie since 2002’s The Banger Sisters. So, how did she convince Hawn to return to the big screen after taking a 15-year hiatus?

“I met her on an airplane a couple of years ago and told her there’s a movie I really want to make with her. And she was very nice. ‘OK, honey.’ She probably thought I was a psycho. ‘OK, crazy person,'” Schumer recalled in a Q&A with The Los Angeles Times, published Wednesday. “Then I’d meet her at different things, saying, ‘We’re making this movie together,’ and I think, eventually, some people got in her ear and told her I wasn’t crazy, that I make things.”

Kim Caramele, Katie Dippold and Schumer had been drafting the script for a while before Hawn agreed to play her mother. “My character is supposed to go on this trip South America with a boyfriend. But he breaks up with her. And it’s a nonrefundable ticket and she doesn’t want to drink alone,” Schumer said, revealing plot details for the first time. “It’s a Goldie Hawn movie and she’s gorgeous. Goldie…Hawn! I don’t remember the first time I didn’t love her!”

Their characters are unlike anything you might see in an Amy Adams movie, Schumer joked. “We’re very much in charge of our own destiny,” she explained. “There’s no other way to be.”

Schumer, 35, and Hawn, 70, bonded instantly on set. In her forthcoming memoir, The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, Schumer wrote “about being an introvert, needing a lot of alone time, needing to recharge a lot. And I’ve been made to feel that that’s a bad quality. In different relationships, people are like, ‘Why do you need time away from the group?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’ And she’s like that, too. And there’s nothing wrong with us.”

The actresses’ still-untitled film, directed by Jonathan Levine, hits theaters in May 2017.