'Scusi, Please!' Talking with the Creators & Stars of New Queer Comedy 'I Don't Understand You'

We're all familiar with the trope of the obnoxious, bumbling American tourist spreading chaos in his wake. Imagine him times two – as a gay couple, in fact – and unleash him on rural Italy, and you have the basic premise of writing-directing team (and married couple) David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano's darkly off-the-wall movie "I Don't Understand You."

The film is described as a "horror comedy," though it takes a novel approach of making monstrosity not out of ghouls, demons, or ghosts, but American anxieties around an inability to communicate in another language or navigate a European social context. When panic and paranoia set in, accidents happen – and bodies accumulate.

"I think selfishness, maybe, or fear itself," Craig says, identifying the film's horror element. "Like, I'm sort of a fearful person, with mostly irrational fears. I think that is something I was trying to kind of exorcise in making a movie."

In another twist that's both queer and contemporary, the couple in Craig and Crano's film – Dom (Nick Kroll) and Cole (Andrew Rannells) – are in the process of adopting a baby. ("It doesn't seem natural to you?" Crano cracks when asked about pairing an Italian adventure with a same-sex adoption story line.)

The baby angle and the touristy traumas both came from real life, Crano explains. "The first act the movie is fairly autobiographical. We were in the adoption process. We had just found out that we had matched with the birth mother for our son, and we were going on our 10th anniversary trip." It was on that adventure that the couple "got stuck in a ditch in the middle of a rainstorm, and, as I was being screamed at," Crano thought, "Oh, this is a funny horror movie where we get killed by rural Italians."

Echoing real life, the film's Italian adventure is a celebration of Dom and Cole's tenth anniversary. But the trip is overshadowed by anxieties about the last time the couple tried to adopt a child and ended up being scammed; this time, they are more confident about the match, even though they have only just met the mother, Candace, who is played by Amanda Seyfried. What makes them nervous is how very pregnant Candace is – and keeping their phones charged in order to get any calls she might make announcing the new arrival.

"Amanda is one of our dearest friends," Craig tells EDGE, "and, for lack of better word, is one of our son's godmothers. So, it was kind of wonderful to have somebody so personal to our son be the birth mother of, you know, our fictitious son." As for the adorable tot who eventually appears, "that is our boy," Craig reveals proudly.

The film is riddled with mishaps that include, yes, a car problem during a rainstorm, along with a grouchy farmer, dinner at a remote farmhouse, and many, many misunderstandings as to what the locals are saying to them. Are they being welcomed or cursed when the people they meet realize they are gay? In one scene, Dom and Cole are encouraged to kiss by someone who, upon seeing the lip lock, exclaims in disgust (though for an entirely unrelated reason). At another moment, a helpful hotel clerk rushes to push the two single beds comprising the couple's "bridal bed" apart before realizing that, yes, Dom and Cole really are married; they just don't happen to be man and wife.

That gag was drawn directly from real life, Crano relates, when a hotel worker failed to understand his relationship with Craig. "Even at this hotel today, I came in with our son, and they were like, 'Oh, where's your wife?,'" he adds. "And I'm like, 'She never existed. Sorry to tell you.'

"I think there's a certain element of being a gay person in the world where you get used to that kind of stuff," Crano continues. "I don't know if they're microaggressions, but they feel like that on some level."

There are aggressions – certainly of the passive sort – between Dom and Cole, as well. Kroll and Rannells bring the couple to life with a mix of devotion and prickliness that any longtime couple will relate to, and that shows off their comedic skills. Kroll has starred in movies like "Sausage Party," "I Love You Man," "Get Him to the Greek," "Sing," and "Vacation." He had a self-titled sketch show on Comedy Central, but he might be best known as a co-creator and star of the Netflix hit "Big Mouth," a randy and envelope-pushing animated series about a group of horny seventh graders just starting to figure out the mysteries of sexuality. The show goes places you wouldn't think anyone would dare, but always from a place of genuinely good intentions.

"What I have found, especially in making 'Big Mouth,' but even before that with 'The Kroll Show,'" Kroll muses, "is that when things come from an emotionally honest place, it really allows for bigger, crazier jokes. They actually balance each other out in a really fun way.

"I think that was one of the things that attracted me to this movie," he adds, "and specifically doing it with Andrew. There was going to be real big, crazy hijinks, but all of it grounded in this nuanced, complicated relationship between two people. I knew Andrew was going to be such a wonderful actor to be able to play all of those colors, so it felt like a very natural fit in the larger... let's call it a catalog of work that I have. And it is a catalog, similar to Taylor Swift."

"You just need to buy back the master," Rannells puts in, without missing a beat.

Rannells is openly gay, and he has an extensive CV of queer roles. He launched his career as a voice actor on TV shows like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" in the mid-1990s before appearing in shows like "The New Normal" and "Girls." He made his Broadway debut in "Hairspray" before starring in in the queer-ish hit "The Book of Mormon," for which he received a Tony nomination. Other Broadway roles included "Jersey Boys," "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," "Falsettos" – which brought him another Tony nom – and "The Boys in the Band." (Rannells also starred in the Ryan Murphy film adaptation.) Off-West End, he starred in "Tammy Faye" as Jim Bakker. He's remained active in voice work, with roles on "Bob's Burgers," "Prince Power," and a whole catalogue of anime projects, not to mention voicing the role of Matthew MacDell in more than 50 episodes of Kroll's show, "Big Mouth."

"I'd like to say that I was always in control of the choices that I make – like, 'I chose to do this project, and I chose to do that,'" Rannells says of his many queer resume. "Sometimes [queer roles] sort of find you, [but] I can't say it was all part of some sort of master plan.

"But I will say that in the time that I have been working, it's been very encouraging to see that there are more varied stories being told using queer characters," he goes on to say. "And this script is such a great example of that; yes, it is about a gay couple, but it's also about a gay couple making really terrible choices – hopefully in a fun and charming way, but also, just behaving so poorly. I love that, because as a gay who often behaves poorly, I'd like to see that reflected back at me." After a pause, he adds: "I've never murdered anyone, though."

"Allegedly," Kroll puts in, drily.

"I Don't Understand You" is hitting screens at a moment when America is not quite what it used to be in relation to the rest of the world. Was that something Crano and Craig could see coming, EDGE wonders, or is this a strange moment of coincidence?

"I think if we'd seen it coming, we wouldn't have left Italy," Crano quips, to laughter. "We would have stayed." More seriously, he adds, "I hope it allows people an escape from the horrible shit that's going on in our country. To laugh in tandem with other people is always a really healthy thing to do."

If laughter was their brief, Crano and Craig were more than halfway to fulfilling it when they brought Kroll and Rannells aboard – not to mention Seyfried, as well as Nunzia Schiano, an esteemed Italian actress who barely needs to try to own the screen. American actor Morgan Spector (of "The Gilded Age" fame) appears, too, in a surprise role that finds him at his sexiest, sporting a sleeveless T-shirt and a convincing Italian accent.

"Morgan has been one of our great friends for a long time, and we know him as such a funny person," Craig explains, "but he always plays these macho, straight, tough guys, so it's fun to let him be silly and broad and let him express this other part of his personality.

"It was a lovely experience to work with each of them," Craig adds. "Nick and Andrew, obviously, carry the movie. They're in every scene, and they're so wonderful together. They had this preexisting friendship that we were able to draw on. You really believe that they're in love with each other, because they are."

EDGE, impressed with that assessment, brings it up to Kroll and Rannells.

"I want you to go back to David and Brian and find out, like, who they really, who the first version of this casting was like," Rannells exclaims, in mock disbelief.

"In their look book," Kroll jumps in.

"Yeah," Rannells says, carrying the joke forward. "I know that there they were ultimately happy with us, but we would like to know who they wanted first. Like, I don't know. It wasn't gay."

"I Don't Understand You" opens in theaters June 6.