Chili Finger’s Cast and Creators Turn Real-Life News Into Black Comedy

In March 2005, no one could stop talking about Wendy’s. Specifically, everyone talked about the fast-food chain’s chili, after a woman claimed to have found a severed finger in her meal. When the claim turned out to be fraudulent, most people forgot about the instance, but not writer Stephen Helstad and his co-director Edd Benda. The duo fictionalized the event for the black comedy Chili Finger, starring Judy Greer, Bryan Cranston, and John Goodman, putting them at risk for the thing that makes Wendy’s famous today: their savage social media presence.

“We know you should never mess around with Wendy’s Twitter profile,” Helstad admits to Den of Geek at SXSW, where Chili Finger held its premiere. “We do all this in love.”

Greer stars in Chili Finger as Jessica Lipki who sues fast food join Blake Junior’s for $100,000 after claiming that she found a finger in her side dish. The suit draws the attention of fixer Dave (Cranston), who investigates the instance on behalf of CEO Blake (Goodman) and his daughter and successor Blake Jr. II (Madeline Wise), drawing attention to Lipki’s home life, including the empty-nest status she’s recently entered with her husband Ron (Sean Astin).

As that description suggests, Chili Finger is less concerned with relitigated a tabloid-ready piece of news from two decades ago and is more interested in exploring the humanity of those involved.

“A lot of films show the stages of parenthood as just new parents, or when the kids are adolescents and it’s hard with teenagers, or later in life, when the kids are getting married,” observes Helstad. “We wanted to explore those immediate days and hours when the nest is first emptied. What does it feel like when a family of three or four is all of a sudden a family of two. Normal day-to-day things are starkly different.”

“We took Lady Bird as an influence,” adds Benda. “As we were developing Chili Finger, it was fun for us to imagine: what the movie would have been like if we stayed with Tracy Letts and Laurie Metcalf?

“Tonally, Greta Gerwig did her job so well that we didn’t want to emulate her,” Benda continues with a self-aware laugh. “But we really loved the way she treated that relationship at the moment of the kids’ departure. It was so beautiful that it left us asking about what happens to them. What if, in that moment, you found a finger in your bowl of chili?

That question helped draw Greer’s involvement, especially since the script so accurately reflected her own experiences as a parent watching her children leave.

“It’s so funny to me that these two young men in their thirties made a movie about a woman who’s an empty-nester, entering midlife and having an existential crisis,” Greer says with a laugh. “I’m always saying, ‘We need to champion women’s voices!” and then I ask them, ‘Why did you guys write such a great character?’

“I remember vividly when I was an empty-nester, and I was a weird one because I had step-kids and came into their lives a bit later. First, it was all about them, and then, all of a sudden, they were gone, and they don’t need you anymore. It’s very strange. You need a moment to get your bearings.”

“Jess has a lot of feelings in the movie,” Greer continues. “I tried to do all of my acting faces and have all the feelings that I’ve ever felt in this role. She loses her cool quite a bit, but I like her because she gets it back. She starts out as a real grown-up, and she just makes a series of terrible decisions. It’s like gambling: you get in, and then you think you have to stay in it.

“It’s interesting because I’m so cautious, and I get to be someone who decides to abandon all caution. I loved being her.”

For Helstad, Jess’s complexity was part of their design. “It was important to us that she has a plan and she gets away with it,” he explains. “But then all these wants and needs and egos of other people, which she did not calculate for get in the way. We wanted her plan to be so innocuous that we accept that it’s well-thought-out, but then it gets away from her.”

Jess isn’t the only woman dealing with complex family relationships in Chili Finger, as the film also explores the tensions between CEO Blake Junior and his daughter Blake Jr. II, who’s ready to take over the business.

“Family drew me to the picture,” says Goodman. “It just seemed like a no-brainer,” he adds, much to the joy of Helstad and Benda.

Relieved as they are to have a big name like Goodman, they’re also thrilled with the work of the performer sharing scenes with him, Madeline Wise as Blake Junior II.

“Madeline Wise is incredible,” Benda declares. “To watch her stand toe-to-toe with John Goodman and Bryan Cranston and Judy Greer and Sean Astin—she had to deliver against a Mount Rushmore of talent, and she did it.”

Between Goodman’s Blake Junior and Wise’s Blake Jr. II, Greer faces off against some formidable competition in Chili Finger. It’s a good thing that she’s already dealt with heavies in Halloween, the Ant-Man films, the Jurassic World trilogy, and the Planet of the Apes movies. Even then, Greer’s not done.

“I’d love to be in the Bourne franchise,” she reveals. “Can someone just throw me a helicopter, but I live, and I have a gun and kill some bad guys?”

“We give a quick zoom and a camera shake, and we’re halfway there,” offers Benda.

Maybe Benda’s joking, or maybe he’s actually offering to help her. Or, most likely, he truly wants Greer to be an action star because he and Helstad will need all the help they can get when the Wendy’s Twitter account hears about Chili Finger.

Chili Finger premiered March 14 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival.