Matty Cardarople Dishes on Filming ‘The Big Sick’s’ Fast-Food Meltdown Scene

The Big Sick has been one of comedy’s most acclaimed and successful movies of the 2017 and features a some of the year’s most entertaining comedic scenes.

The film tells the true story of comedian Kumail Nanjiani coping with his estranged girlfriend’s coma with solid supporting performances from Holly Hunter, Ray Romano, Zoe Kazan and more. In one scene, Nanjiani gets overwhelmed with the ongoing crisis and his own family drama and takes out his frustrations on an innocent fast-food restaurant trash can as the staff looks on in shock.

PopCulture.com chatted with one of the scene’s supporting actors, Matty Cardarople, about filming the moment. Cardarople, who is best known for his role on A Series of Unfortunate Events, played the cashier who got a front-row seat to Nanjiani’s drive-thru meltdown.

“It was incredible,” he said. “[The scene] was filmed in New York City at 3 a.m. It was great. He had written the scene that I had auditioned for, but they ended up improvising a lot, so we worked on the scene on the spot. It was fun because it felt really fresh. I like that kind of acting where it’s a combination of acting and scripted. They really work well that way.”

Apparently this combination was key in Cardarople’s performance, as Nanjiani’s rage was truly intimidating.

“There’s a scene where Kumail is screaming at me. I really felt terrified, but I didn’t try to be funny,” he said. “A lot of the time, you want to be funny in scenes and try to make people laugh, but if you just play the situation the way it’s written, it ends up being funnier than you had hoped.”

The Big Sick is still playing in select theaters and will be released digitally on Sept. 5.

Cardarople can be seen as the Henchperson of Indeterminate Gender in A Series of Unfortuante Events, which is currently streaming on Netflix.