In her new movie Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, Zoey Deutch is surrounded by A-list costars including Jennifer Aniston.
And sharing the screen with the former Friends actress, 57, was an experience she won’t soon forget.
“That was incredibly surreal for me,” Deutch, 31, recently told PEOPLE. “I have met this person and I’ve spoken to them a couple times, and they’re incredibly warm and lovely and funny, but working with them was absolutely one of the most surreal moments of my life and inspiring too.”
“It’s like when you just see someone who’s the greatest of all time doing it, you’re like, ‘Goddammit,’” she continues.
“Every take was just so brilliant and I was probably the worst actor in the world because I was more of an audience than a participant,” she adds. “I couldn’t help myself. It was definitely one of the coolest moments of my life.”
The scene Deutch shares with Aniston is brief, but very funny. In the film, Deutch plays Gail Daughtry, a perky hairdresser from Kansas who’s engaged to the wholesome-seeming Tom (Michael Cassidy). When Aniston, playing herself, comes to their small town for a cookbook signing, Gail walks in on Tom having sex with the Emmy-winning actress on a sofa.
Though Tom thought it was okay because Aniston was his celebrity sex pass — the one famous person he was allowed to sleep with, per a passing conversation he had with his fiancée — Gail is shocked. So she decides to even the score before their wedding day by tracking down her celebrity sex pass: Jon Hamm.
What ensues is a completely ridiculous Wizard of Oz-like adventure — an R-rated adventure, that is. “I had a blast,” Deutch says about making the movie, directed by David Wain and co-written by Wain and Ken Marino (the pair who co-wrote the 2012 comedy Wanderlust that starred Aniston and Paul Rudd).
“I have been a fan of David’s work for so long, I just was like, no one else could write this,” she adds. “No one else could make this. It’s so singular and so specific to him.”
“And he’s the kind of director where he’s like, ‘Do this,’ and you don’t question it because it might not make sense to you in the moment, but you trust him because he has such a unique world and vision,” says Deutch, who also stars in the Netflix rom-com Voicemails for Isabelle and the new animated movie Minions & Monsters.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is now playing in theaters.
