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"Tag" Interview with Ultra Fiesta

Details: 20 Jun; Written by coolshades

Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner and Ed Helms Talk About "Tag," Their New Summer Comedy That Celebrates a Childhood Game (Los Angeles Daily News)

Details: 19 Jun; Written by coolshades

By Peter Larsen

Long before the script for “Tag” made its way to Jon Hamm the actor says he remembers reading the Wall Street Journal article about the real guys who’ve played a never-ending game of tag for decades, a crew of childhood friends whom Hamm and the rest of the cast play fictional versions of in the summer comedy that arrives with equal measures of silly and sweet on Friday.

“I was completely fascinated,” Hamm says. “The thing that really drew me in was what drew the guy that wrote the article in. He sat having a business interview about who knows what, earnings and price ratios or whatever. They’re in a midtown corporate boardroom and another guy walks in, and the first guy jumps up and runs out of the room and they chase each other through the office.

“And then the guy comes back and says, ‘Where were we?’ and the reporter’s like, ‘What the (bleep) just happened?’”

Five years after that article that same scene opens “Tag,” with businessman Bob Callahan, played by Hamm, pursued through his office at breakneck speed by his boyhood friend Hogan “Hoagie” Malloy, played by Ed Helms.

Hamm, Helms and Jeremy Renner, who plays Jerry Pierce, the one friend who in decades of playing tag for the 31 days of May each year, has never been “it,” sat down together earlier this month in a suite at the Four Seasons Los Angeles at Beverly Hills to talk about the film that brought them together and the messages they discovered in its story. (Elsewhere in the hotel, talking with other reporters, were Hannibal Buress, who plays Kevin Sable, and Jake Johnson, who plays Randy “Chilli” Chilliano, the other two members of the movie’s tag team.)

Hamm (“Mad Men,” “Baby Driver”) had been in and out of the movie as it worked its way through development and his schedule changed, but Helms (“The Office,” “The Hangover” series) says he was a solid yes as soon as he read the script, as was Renner.