From Stand-Up to Standout

From Stand-Up to Standout

No one could understand why Amy Schumer was not freaking out.

It was the day before production began on “Trainwreck,” now shooting on the streets of New York, and this Kewpie-eyed, razor-tongued comedian was about to undertake her first meaty movie role.

Not just any role, but the starring role. Directed by the comedy juggernaut Judd Apatow. Featuring Daniel Radcliffe and Tilda Swinton, among other big names. Also, Ms. Schumer, 33, wrote the script.

With so much resting on her shoulders, various cast and crew members said, surely she was jittery, at the very least?

“I’m really not,” Ms. Schumer remembers replying. “Is that naïve?”

It was a show of the sang-froid that has defined and elevated Ms. Schumer, who in less than three years has gone from stealing the show at a Charlie Sheen roast to creating an Emmy-nominatedComedy Central series to now sailing toward mainstream fame, Mr. Apatow’s wind at her back.

On the face of it, theirs seems an odd comic coupling.

Caustic and unblinkingly ribald, Ms. Schumer’s comedy takes dead aim at gender roles. One of the skits on her show, “Inside Amy Schumer,” takes place in “O’Nutters,” a sendup of Hooters where the wait staff consists of testicularly endowed men. In another, Ms. Schumer plays her boyfriend’s military video game: Her avatar, a female soldier, ends up being raped and publicly shamed, a scenario she manages to imbue with dark humor.

Mr. Apatow, 46, has built a career out of softer fare, from the high school misfits of “Freaks and Geeks” to Seth Rogen’s bumbling journey toward fatherhood in “Knocked Up,” that has honed a reputation for creating so-called man-boys who resist growing up. It’s a characterization he disagrees with and resents — “In most of my movies, there’s an equal component of what female characters are up against in their lives,” he said — and one he has chipped away at in recent years by serving as an executive producer of Lena Dunham’s HBO show, “Girls,” and producing “Bridesmaids,” which grossed $288 million worldwide. Both Ms. Schumer and Mr. Apatow said their approaches were not all that different. “We find the same things funny,” Ms. Schumer said.

“And we both appreciate brutally honest comedy,” Mr. Apatow said.

The pair met two years ago, after Mr. Apatow heard Ms. Schumer on Howard Stern’s show while idling in Los Angeles traffic and was struck, he said, by her warmth and biting humor. Always on the lookout for funny people who can tell interesting tales, he contacted her to brainstorm on a potential script.

They abandoned her original idea — they declined to divulge what it was — and came up with a story plumbed heavily from Ms. Schumer’s life, about a commitment-averse woman trying to get past her self-sabotaging ways. In other words, pitch-perfect Apatow fare.

“Most people aren’t that funny — there’s only a few that take it to a higher place,” Mr. Apatow said one recent morning on the “Trainwreck” set in Douglas Manor in northeastern Queens. “She’s insanely funny, and she has stories to tell.” Working on the script, he said, he pushed Ms. Schumer to dig into her vulnerabilities, “almost like a therapist thing.” He said he had never worked with anyone who wrote so quickly.

Ms. Schumer said that as her friendship with Mr. Apatow grew — she calls him her “fairy godfather” — her trust in him deepened as well. “I’m not afraid he’s going to slam the door shut,” she said, “We’re in this together.”

Bill Hader, the “Saturday Night Live” alumnus who plays Ms. Schumer’s would-be Mr. Right in “Trainwreck,” described the partnership between the comedian and the director as “the perfect melding.”

“Judd’s interested in comedy and sadness and people self-sabotaging and the messiness of life,” he said, “and Amy is interested in the same.”

One morning on the set, Ms. Schumer was sitting in a director’s chair, exquisitely made up, blond hair flowing, sipping a decaffeinated Starbucks concoction because caffeine makes her “go nuts.” She was complaining about her microphone pack, which, she revealed with a hoist of her dress, was taped to her upper thigh. “It’s digging into my vagina,” she groused.

A neighbor kept appearing in his driveway, saying he was waiting for friends and refusing to get out of the shot. Ms. Schumer shut him down as she would a heckler. “Really — do you really have friends?” she hollered. He disappeared into his house.

Microphone box and pesky neighbor aside, Ms. Schumer was the picture of equipoise.

“I’ve acted in a lot of films where the lead wrote the movie,” Mr. Hader said. “She’s definitely the calmest.”

Ms. Schumer attributed her relaxed demeanor partly to the magnitude of resources for the production. A multimillion-dollar movie crawling with experienced crew members and overseen by a seasoned director, “Trainwreck” is starkly different from her own show, which is produced at a breakneck pace by a small team on a fraction of the budget.

“Making this feels like a vacation,” Ms. Schumer said of the film. “I’m the most relaxed I’ve been in 10 years.”

A former volleyball player at her Long Island high school, she has approached the filming with an athlete’s discipline: getting a good night’s sleep, abstaining from alcohol (except on Fridays) and keeping her comedy muscles nimble by doing stand-up on the weekends.

She is also a trained actress: After appearing in plays while growing up, she earned a degree in theater from Towson University in Maryland and studied for two years with the William Esper Studio in New York. Her acting chops reveal themselves in her television skits and, her co-stars say, on the set. Mr. Hader said that in one scene, she left onlookers sniffling when her character delivered a eulogy.

With less than two weeks left in the film’s shooting schedule, Ms. Schumer said she was already mourning the end. The movie’s release is set for next summer, and however it is received, Mr. Apatow said he feels that he caught her at the perfect time.

“There’s a moment early in someone’s career where they will kill and die for what they’re writing about,” he said. “That’s why sometimes these first movies are the best ones. Because people never have this level of commitment again.”