You Don't Mess with the Zohan was a testosterone filled set with Adam Sandler playing a buff superhero, and other male comedians making dirty jokes. Emmanuelle Chriqui played the Zohan's love interest and insisted all the guys behaved.
Emmanuelle Chriqui Doesn't Mess with the Zohan
"They absolutely treated me like a lady," said Chriqui. "Really, it's not something I even noticed. It keeps being brought to my attention, so what's it like to work with the guys and da da da. But immediately I just felt so comfortable. Adam and Dennis [Dugan] and Robert [Smigel], it was just was a family, like just brothers and I really had the time of my life."
Like families, there was a tiny bit of hazing. "There was a lot of teasing."
You Don't Mess with the Zohan
You Don't Mess with the Zohan
You Don't Mess with the Zohan
It was all in good fun though, as is the film's perspective on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. "There have been scripts along the way that talked about the Arab-Jew thing that I was actually never comfortable to even touch it. There was really bias on one side or the other. This was just so funny. Reading a script you had to put down 3 times to laugh for 10 minutes is a hard thing to do, and I did that with this and just absolutely wanted to be a part of it."
Hopefuly, it will encourage some of the more impassioned parties to lighten up a little too. "I think to be able to shed a little bit of light in a really really bleak situation is what I think we do when people laugh at this movie. That's it. We can co-exist. We were Arabs and Jews together, making this movie and we've really bonded."
You Don't Mess with the Zohan opens to theatres on June 6th.
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