Wes Gill Changes, Magic the Gathering Black Lotus

Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for “Voicemail for Isabel,” now streaming on Netflix.

Netflix’s latest romantic comedy hit, “Voicemail for Isabel,” arrived on the streamer last Friday after nearly eight years of transition, including screenwriter Leah McKendrick taking over as director. One of the biggest changes made to the script since it was first read by stars Zoey Deutch (“Something from Tiffany”) and Nick Robinson (“Love, Simon”) was a key element of the overall plot: how much Wes (Robinson) tried to tell Jill (Deutch) that she was receiving the intimate voicemail he left for his late sister Isabel (Ciara Bravo).

It’s a rom-com mishap that leads to a cute meet-and-greet and subsequent happy ending, but it relied on viewers really believing that Wes wasn’t a monster who was using the situation (he was assigned Isabel’s old phone number and Jill kept calling and leaving messages even though she hadn’t set up an outgoing message) to trick Jill into falling in love with Wes. To make this point clear, writer-director McKendrick says that throughout the production of “Voicemails for Isabelle,” he inserted more moments that showed his goodwill.

“You know the scene where he’s in the bathroom and he’s trying to tell her and then he comes out and sits on the couch and says it. He’s like, ‘I had your voicemail,’ and is she asleep? That was added very last minute,” McKendrick told Variety. “I was already in Vancouver, getting ready, and really the studio (Black Label Media) was like, we want him to try to do the right thing, we need to see him try. I was always having him text me, but it never got through. I think there was a loss of service at some point, he was trying to do that. And it’s just a series of failed connections, and I think you can see that hopefully his heart is in the right place, but it’s getting harder and harder to do the right thing. ”

But McKendrick believes that the considerable sympathy audiences feel for Wes comes from the chemistry between Robinson and Deutch.

“More than anything, I think casting Nick Robinson really helped because he’s a very genuine, genuine person,” McKendrick said. “As a human being, he has an open mind to follow Nick Robinson wherever he goes.”

Although Wes and Jill’s story is the central romance of “Voicemail for Isabel,” it is not the main love story. This award goes to the relationship between Jill and Isabel, which is only shown on screen for the first few minutes of the film, before Isabel dies. Jill must take it upon herself to keep the sisterhood together by adding new messages to the vast catalog of voicemails they sent each other when they were younger. This leads to a deep love that Wes forms for her over a troubling and true revelation about life.

“Jill’s sister was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when she was a child, so Jill was home a lot,” Deutsch said. “Then, once Jill moved out of the family home, the sisters got into a routine of leaving each other long voicemails and narrating everything going on in their lives. And that’s how they communicated. And while there’s not a lot of screen time between them, that’s also a reflection of their own relationship as adults. They don’t get to see each other as much. They mainly communicated over the phone so that Jill could move forward with her life and pursue her dreams. And that was a big deal. It meant not being able to be in the same city as her sister, which is something that a lot of people have to face in life, but we were so lucky to have Ciara in this role and she’s such a great actress. ”

Wes’ love for Jill is expressed in many ways throughout the film, but one of the most unique is when he presents her with an item of great value. It’s the ultra-rare “Black Lotus” card from Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game created by Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast.

The entire plot point of Magic: The Gathering is set up early in the film and later occurs when Jill loses all of Isabel’s voicemails due to a phone malfunction and Wes trades a “Black Lotus” card to a co-worker to enlist the hacker’s help in retrieving the messages, which was also “a really, really last minute addition” to the script.

“It almost made me wonder if they had actually already started filming or were about to start filming,” McKendrick said. “And it was a really great idea, but it was very difficult to make it happen.”

This happened when the producers suggested that Wes be the one responsible for getting Jill’s voicemail back from Isabel. The truth finally comes out and Wes chooses to do so after Wes and Jill have already broken up. (McKendrick said her original script had Isabel go to the Apple Store and break down at the Genius Bar to get them back.) But Wes himself didn’t have the technical skills to get them back, so he had to pay someone who could.

“He has to give something of value, and they were like, ‘What if it’s his car? What if it’s his parking space?’ And I was like, ‘I hate it if his favorite thing is his car.’ That’s not endearing, and it just reinforces this stupid image,” McKendrick said. “And I believe that deep down my character isn’t. I believe that my character is kind of a closet nerd, probably like all of us. And that brings me closer to him. And they’re like, OK, but it has to be something really valuable — what’s valuable in the nerd world? I thought, everything is valuable in the nerd world! Originally I was like Pokemon. And I started doing some research, and it really It was crazy, because they have to clear this. And I already started learning about Magic: The Gathering and how expensive and rare some of these cards are, and how they’re like the Holy Grail. And then I went down this rabbit hole of Magic: The Gathering, and I thought, “Do you think you can clear Magic?” I think I was able to clear it on the day of shooting or the day before. And they had to make copies. That was just outrageous. ”

However, when he went to shoot, Robinson wasn’t sold on the idea.

“I remember Nick saying to me, ‘Are you sure you’re okay with this Magic: The Gathering thing?'” McKendrick said. “And I said, ‘Nick, I structured the scene so that if it didn’t work, I could cut it. I promise you, I got this. I thought this through. We have to shoot it.’ Then he I started seeing you filming scenes with Magic: The Gathering cards, and I said, “You’re not helping cut this.” You’re so adorable talking about Magic: The Gathering. “That’s when I thought, “Wow, we all somehow fell in love with Magic.” ”

In addition to being the film’s writer and director, McKendrick also stars in the supporting cast as Breeda, one of Wes’ best friends who is engaged to another of Wes’ best friends, Andy (Harry Shum Jr.).

“I don’t know if I always intended to play Breeda,” McKendrick said. “But it’s so important to me to be in all my movies. Even though I’m comfortable, it feels like I’m pushing the actors into a freezing cold pool. I want to be in the pool with them and feel like we’re all doing this together. It feels more real to my process that I’m in the movie and I’m also in the world.”