If you’ve seen at least one I Think You Should Leave sketch, it’s pretty easy to imagine Tim Robinson tripping balls. Most of his characters are already aggressively out of their minds.
While writing the script that would become Friendship for Robinson in 2021, Andrew DeYoung naturally thought that it’d be funny to have a scene revolving around his protagonist taking psychedelics. At the time, Eric André’s Bad Trip had just come out on Netflix. “They have an excellent trip sequence in a supermarket,” the director says. “I remember being like, ‘Damn, they did such a good job.’”
“How do I beat that?” he recalls saying to himself. “You’ve got to go crazy.” After thinking it over, he changed his mind. Going big would be too predictable. “You think about it, and it feels all of a sudden like a ton of work,” he says. “It doesn’t feel fun and organic. And I was like, ‘Well, the way you beat that’—or not beat it, but subvert expectations—‘is you go the exact opposite route.’”
That meant taking a trip to Subway. Late in Friendship, Craig Waterman (Robinson) takes enterprising cellphone store employee Tony (Billy Bryk) up on his offer of something “stronger than beer.” Initially, he requests ayahuasca—the local weatherman he’s trying (and failing) to be friends with, Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), had a book about it in his house. But the best Tony can do is a lick of an exotic toad. The taste sends Craig off on a hallucinogenic journey … to America’s third-biggest fast food chain. In his vision, Austin works there. He orders a Black Forest ham sandwich on Italian herb and cheese bread. Nothing else really happens.
It’s an anti–set piece. “You build it up, build it up, build it up,” DeYoung says. And then you let it fall flatter than a footlong that’s been run over by an 18-wheeler. In a movie filled with Robinson’s signature outbursts, it’s a shockingly, hilariously low-key punch line. “If you’ve got to go banal, you’ve got to go into the [third]-biggest fast food chain,” DeYoung adds with a smile.
The moment is as fitting as it is surprising. Craig isn’t a man capable of vivid fantasies. When he does drugs, he can’t even imagine himself as a superhero from his beloved MCU. All that his subconscious conjures is a chain restaurant. It’s a particularly American deficiency. “It feels like a comment on not only this character’s kind of inner landscape,” DeYoung says, “but also the grasp that capital has on our psyche in general.”
These are heady themes for a laugh-out-loud flick. But hey, it’s 2025. Broad theatrical comedies are almost extinct. DeYoung figured the best way to explore modern male bonding would be to drop Robinson, in all his over-the-top glory, into a serious drama. His performance is basically the inverse of Leslie Nielsen’s in The Naked Gun: Craig’s world is exceedingly normal, and the way he acts is exceedingly not. “We’re just playing everything as real as possible,” DeYoung says. “And he really was so brilliant at just rooting that, and it helps with the subversion.”
When DeYoung says he wanted to play everything as real as possible, he means everything. Even the jokes. “I grew up around Subway. I have a love for Subway,” says DeYoung, who’s from Fresno, California. “I’m not making fun of it at all. And this character loves it, too.”
Toad licking? Also real. “It’s something I’ve known about,” DeYoung says. “I have no experience with it. I’m very much a sober person, but I like the idea. I like the ancientness of it.” Plus, he adds, “it’s also just something unexpected in the back of a cellphone store. It’s, again, something subverting commercialism.”
The hallucination sequence was shot in a real mall Subway. “When I wrote it, I’m like, ‘OK, if this movie gets made, it’ll be changed to some other generic sandwich place,’” says DeYoung, who’s also an executive producer of Robinson’s upcoming HBO series, The Chair Company. “And my producers asked Subway, and Subway was down.”
Since Friendship premiered at TIFF last year, DeYoung started noticing that Letterboxd reviewers were mentioning Subway. “People assume that it’s some type of product placement,” he says. “But it was there from the jump. If it feels like product placement, it makes it really funny and interesting.”
At the festival, DeYoung attended a packed screening “filled with Tim’s most rabid fans.” By then, the director thought the movie was in pretty good shape. But he wasn’t expecting the amount of laughter he heard. It felt absurd.
“I’m like, ‘This is unbelievable,’” DeYoung says. “It probably ruined my life because I’ll keep chasing that moment forever. It felt psychedelic.”
Reviews of Friendship—which will be released nationwide on May 23—have been overwhelmingly positive. But there was a time when DeYoung wondered whether he’d even be able to get the movie made. “So many people read it, loved it, but didn’t want to work on it,” says DeYoung, who wrote the script with his buddy Robinson in mind.
The executives DeYoung was pitching claimed that they couldn’t see the, well, unique Robinson as a headliner. “I kind of realized, through conversations with my agent, that a lot of people were nervous about Tim’s star power or Tim leading something,” he says. “Which always baffled me. He’s in every sketch of his show. He’s fucking phenomenal. He can do what Daniel Day Lewis can do, but Daniel Day Lewis can’t do what Tim can do.”
Robinson, DeYoung says, “has a lot of fans” in Hollywood. Still, that apparently wasn’t enough to get a green light. And that frustrated the hell out of the director. “I was like, ‘So many people are going to want to make this movie, it feels so clear,’” he says. “And the fact that wasn’t the case really shocked me and showed me how terrified the industry ultimately is.”
Eventually, production companies BoulderLight Pictures (Barbarian, Companion) and Fifth Season (Severance, Killing Eve) offered financing. Indie king A24, whose cult of fans overlaps with Robinson’s, signed on to distribute the movie. The studio recently started selling Friendship hats. They’re now sold out.
“Hopefully now that the movie seems to be working, people will have a little more confidence [in films like it],” DeYoung says. Friendship opened in only six locations on Friday, but over its first weekend it reportedly pulled in $451,000 at the box office. It also had a per-theater average gross of $75,430, the highest limited opening of the year.
“This is how it happens,” DeYoung says. “Someone takes a risk, shows that there’s a market for it, and then all the cowards fall in line.”
