THE TRIP TO SPAIN is the third installment in a series of films following comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon through beautiful locales as they partake in the local delicacies. However, don’t confuse the fictional Coogan and Brydon for the real actors; the film is a heightened version of themselves — the movie version of their funny personas.
Director Michael Winterbottom spoke to RogerEbert.com about the blurry line between comedian and character, “I love films that play with or switch the versions of real events and real people. In this case it’s probably just simplicity of continuing what we’ve done before. It just felt like it kind of came out of their conversations. They had conversations about their career, about families, about their different views of the world and it just felt like it would be much richer and simpler if they were expressing those as themselves rather than trying to create a kind of character that explains who they are. We thought that it would be much freer, and funnier and actually engaging as well, playing the variations of themselves. I think it’s what a lot of comedians do anyway. With stand-up comedians there’s a big overlap between who they are really and the character they portray onstage. They’re talking and being funny and exaggerating but it overlaps very closely who they are.”
