Kali Hawk is on fire! How she built a career from a one-line audition

From Movieline:

You’ve really built a career out of improv, whether it’s these last two movies you booked or “Lovers & Haters,” the Mariah Carey short film you starred in that Spike Lee directed. Is there a throughline between all those projects?
I guess it really sort of started with the Spike Lee thing. That character had a line or two and once I got cast, I did the table read and Spike started taking lines from other people and giving them to my character. So that part was a small part that got made bigger, and then I got Couples Retreat down the line, and you know how you see on the poster, how I’m on it and my name is big? For most people, that billing was in their contract. My character started out so small and I had such a small agent at the time that I didn’t really have any negotiating power. After I got the movie and they saw what I could do, Vince [Vaughn] would actually write more scenes for me to do while we were shooting it, so getting on the poster and getting that star billing, that came later and that came from Vince, one of the producers on it.

Get Him to the Greek, that was a one-line part where, even though I’d just done Couples Retreat, I wanted to do this movie because it’s Judd Apatow and I want to work with those guys. I’d be a craft services person to get close to them, like, Judd knows talent and if he likes me, then maybe there’s something that he could do. And then I got that part and my one-line character got expanded to where they would just put me into stuff. It’s partly because of that movie that I moved to UTA; my agent started taking notice after I got Couples, but Judd is at UTA, and once a guy like that and everyone else associated with that movie started saying good things about me, that definitely helped the agency really like me.

So it’s weird! You go in for these small things, but they can be made bigger if you’re open to just giving them all you have. I feel like people respect that ultimately, and they do reward you for it.

What kind of new things did you bring to Trudy in Couples Retreat that may not have been on the page?
Well, I know that when I read it, it was kind of written in this standard urban girl way. You’d read it and you’d get a sense of how they would want it done, but I imagine the breakdown for it was that she’s urban, sexy, sassy…I love when they put “urban” in there. They’re getting so specific in a very generic way.

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