Thomas Vincent, Kaley Cuoco and David Oyelowo attend the Role Play premiere.
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
[This story contains spoilers for the Prime Video film Role Play.]
The team behind the Prime Video action-comedy movie Role Play had initially intended to make things a little extra challenging for Kaley Cuoco and David Oyelowo‘s lead characters before the lights went up.
Thomas Vincent, who directed the recent Amazon MGM Studios film from a script by Seth Owen, tells The Hollywood Reporter that there had been a planned final moment at the end in which Emma (Cuoco) gets a bit of a scare as husband Dave (Oyelowo) realizes that her high-risk lifestyle as a professional assassin might not actually be in the past.
“At some point, there was an epilogue in Mexico, and they were in their next life and in a restaurant,” Vincent recalls. “A bunch of big guys came in, like Mafia guys. Then, the boss, as soon as he sat down at a table, just had a heart attack and died. The two of them were having a drink at the bar, and David was turning toward her, saying, ‘Huh? You said you stopped!’”
According to Vincent, the potential conclusion was never shot, as the filmmakers decided to give the couple’s story a bit more closure. The ending that Vincent opted for shows the pair and their kids on the move after Oyelowo survives his wife having shot him in the abdomen to mislead her cohorts. “At some point, we made the choice to go more simple — stick with the story,” he explains. “This would probably be the beginning of the sequel.”
Vincent praises the connection between Cuoco and Oyelowo for helping to propel the feature. Role Play tells the story of a married couple who decide to spice things up with a little role-playing during a night out at a bar, which leads to Oyelowo’s character finally learning the truth about his wife’s double life after a man they meet over drinks soon turns up dead.
“We knew that we wanted to have that balance between comedy and action and make a really sweet film — and a film that was based on these two characters and these two actors — because the chemistry between the two of them was so great,” the director continues. “That was gold, and this is really what we wanted to build the film on.”
Role Play is currently streaming on Prime Video.