John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein were looking forward to filming a pivotal scene in Mayday when they got some bad news.
To re-create a Soviet-era May Day parade, the duo had enlisted 1,000 extras and 1,000 crewmembers. Their costume designer, Debra McGuire, created 1,000 period-accurate military uniforms, while the production had a dozen Soviet tanks at the ready and a custom-built nuclear launch vehicle for the shoot.
“It was massive,” says Goldstein, of preparing for the big day in 2024.
Then, the team hit a major problem. Budapest would no longer let them shoot in Heroes’ Square, which was supposed to double for Moscow’s Red Square.
Normally, that would send a production into a tailspin. But fortunately for Daley and Goldstein, they had an ace in the hole: Ryan Reynolds.
The Mayday star simply picked up the phone and called the mayor of Budapest.
“It’s like the 500-pound elephant when we need him,” says Goldstein. “Everyone takes his call.”
Recalls Reynolds with a laugh: “One of the obscene luxuries and disgusting side effects of fame is that you can get people on the phone that you otherwise couldn’t. I can take advantage of that, as long as I’m fighting for the side of good.”
The shoot was back on.
This was just one in a series of improbabilities that led to Mayday arriving on Apple TV on Sept. 4. The 1980s Cold War action comedy stars Reynolds as an American pilot downed in Russia. To get back home, he accepts the help of a Top Gun-loving ex-KGB operative, played by Kenneth Branagh.
Daley and Goldstein dreamed up Mayday while in postproduction on 2023’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. It seemed like a long shot, an expensive period movie not tied to IP.
But Reynolds and the directors had been looking to work together for years, and the duo pitched it to the star and his Maximum Effort banner. Reynolds and Daley first met 20 years earlier on the set of their 2005 raunchy comedy Waiting, chronicling a day in the lives of the staff at a cheesy chain restaurant. Daley was 19 and then known as an actor on Freaks and Geeks. “He had such dark comedic instincts at such a young age,” says Reynolds, who revered Freaks and Geeks.
With Maximum Effort on board, Mayday quickly came together, with Skydance and Apple backing the project, and Daley and Goldstein convincing Branagh that he could become an action lead — in his 60s.
As Branagh recalls in an email to The Hollywood Reporter, the duo had one piece of advice: “Get here early and practice so that you can use the action beats to really tell the story of the character.” (He showed up a few weeks ahead of filming.)
Kenneth Branagh and Ryan Reynolds in Mayday.
Apple TV
Mayday is the latest in a string of crowd-pleasers from Goldstein and Daley, who met on the set of The Geena Davis Show, where Goldstein was a Harvard-educated lawyer turned writer and Daley was acting. The show ran for one season in 2000-01, but it would lead to the guys’ long-lasting partnership. 2011’s Horrible Bosses became their first produced screenplay, and their credits grew to include writing 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming and directing Vacation (2015).
But it was Game Night (2018) that solidified Goldstein and Daley as a pair with both comedic chops and their own shooting style. They filmed it like a thriller, an inventive idea for a comedy, and were rewarded with a highly rewatchable movie that includes the oft-memed police officer played by Jesse Plemons.
They followed it up with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023), which, while not a box office hit, was liked by critics and audiences, and which proved they could put their own spin on an IP.
John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein on the set of Mayday.
Apple
Today, they share an office on the Paramount lot but do their writing at home, spending all day on Zoom, writing and acting out the dialogue together.
“We’re very conversational when we’re writing our dialogue. We’re even putting in the voices of Ryan and Kenneth as we’re writing,” says Daley of their experience on Mayday.
Given their comedy backgrounds, one might assume improv is a big part of their on-set process. While Goldstein and Daley say the funniest line in each of their movies generally is something an actor improvised, it’s not their go-to method. One reason: They need to be overprepared, so if a cast or crewmember asks one of them a question, they know what the other would say.
“You have to come into it more prepared than a singular director, so that there isn’t too much daylight between us when we’re talking to our actors and our crew,” says Daley.
Reynolds, a screenwriter in his own right with credits including the $1.3 billion grosser Deadpool & Wolverine, is known for shaping many of his movies as an uncredited writer, such as Free Guy and The Adam Project. But he enjoyed taking a step back on the writing in Mayday. “They’d really crafted a complete tale, a truly complete story,” says Reynolds, who was posting Deadpool & Wolverine while shooting the movie.
Writes Branagh in an email of the duo: “Their preparation was exemplary. They had answers for every question but were also open to the new idea, but always, always stuck to their vision.”
Branagh was put through his paces on the movie with stunts, many of which he performed himself. He even allowed his arm to be lit on fire for a screen test.
“We had to goop up his arm and light his arm on fire. We’re standing there with his arm burning — a very surreal moment,” recalled Goldstein. Ultimately, the insurer on the movie would not allow the gag to be filmed, so it was done with visual effects in the actual movie.
In all, the Mayday shoot was around 48 days, plus a month of pre-shooting aerial scenes in the South of France, which they then projected onto a Volume stage in Montreal for Reynolds’ flight scenes. Skydance boss David Ellison gave notes on the aviation elements, as a pilot himself.
In test screenings, the Goldstein and Daley look for the normal things — most importantly, is the audience engaged? — but have an interesting barometer for success: how much popcorn people are eating at various times of the movie. “There’s actually a direct correlation between stuffing your face versus engagement in the movie,” says Goldstein.
However they got there, the movie worked. Mayday matched their final test screening scores for Game Night, and earned an 81 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, making it a relatively rare big-budget streaming movie to win over critics.
With Mayday out, Goldstein and Daley have been turning their attention to their next high-profile project: Paramount’s revamped Star Trek movie. Right now, they just have a deal to write, with an eye to direct. (They never commit to directing until a script is in.)
They pursued the project aggressively, first pitching it to Don Granger, the Skydance exec who now leads Paramount’s film division, then getting signoff from studio heads Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg.
They describe the elevator pitch as “Training Day meets Crimson Dawn.” It’s tonally darker than their previous work, and has the least comedic elements.
“We’re sort of exploring themes of corruption in this film,” says Daley, with Goldstein adding, “Without being cynical, without it going against what Gene Roddenberry’s vision for Star Trek was all about, which was a utopian future.
“Some of the sort of institutions of Star Trek might not be entirely pure,” he adds of their take.
The pressure is high. Trek has been dormant on the big screen since Star Trek Beyond underperformed a decade ago, and the franchise is a priority for Ellison’s Paramount. Numerous creatives have tried to get a movie off the ground, to no avail.
But they’re not focused on any of that. For now, they’re just spending time on Zoom, acting out the parts to each other, hoping to create something Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike can embrace — and maybe get an audience so sucked in that they put down their popcorn.
