McG has made a career out of bigger, brighter, and bouncier—whether it was Sugar Ray’s sun-bleached SoCal videos, the slow-motion chaos of Charlie’s Angels, or now Family Switch, his Netflix holiday-body-swap comedy that swaps Freaky Friday’s one-two switcheroo for a whole household—including the baby and the dog.
The film leans into absurdity without abandoning heart. “We want laugh-out-loud moments, but maybe a tear along the way,” McG says, citing Big and Home Alone as tonal touchstones. He’s not shy about embracing the body-swap canon either: from the original Freaky Friday through Jumanji, he’s liked them all. The difference here is that actors have to play two characters—often wildly different. “You’ve got to create tremendous separation between those two characters,” he says. “That’s where the fun is.”
The cast is a game mix of leads (Jennifer Garner, Ed Helms, Emma Myers) and a rogue’s gallery of cameos—Rita Moreno, Fortune Feimster, Pete Holmes, Howie Mandel, even Weezer. McG calls Rivers Cuomo’s appearance “straight stalking” after chasing him since ’93’s Blue Album. Off-camera, the set turned into a jam session, with Cuomo and bandmate Brian Bell trading songs with Helms. “They played the Rover by Led Zeppelin, old blues standards… the kids went crazy,” McG says.
Music has always been McG’s secret weapon. A product of the music-video era, he still sees films “in a musical capacity and vice versa,” aiming to make movies you could understand with the sound off or the picture gone. His signature hyper-saturated greens came from pushing the early digital intermediate process to extremes—half Hype Williams color pop, half Spike Jonze mischief. “I’ve never turned my back on it,” he says. “I like to be blown away by movies—completely transported.”
That sensibility is alive in Family Switch, from the holiday palette to the quick-cut comedy, to the fact that the most reliable performers on set were Pickles the dog and a baby who landed a first word between takes. McG laughs: “I’d tease Jen and Ed—‘Why can’t you be like Pickles? He hits his mark every time.’”
If the goal was to make a movie families could agree on, McG thinks they hit it. “It’s a live-action Pixar movie—intelligent but easy to access,” he says. “Colorful, fun, magical… that’s everything I love.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
