25 things you didn’t know about your favorite rom-coms

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days: The best scenes were unplanned

Some of the best movie scenes in our favorite movies end up being ones that were completely unplanned. Many directors, especially in comedies, encourage the stars to improvise and go with the flow if anything goes wrong. Those shots often end up being the funniest, and end up in the final cut.

Sure enough, in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, a lot of scenes were actually improvised!

If you haven’t seen it, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days is the story of a journalist, Andie (Kate Hudson), who’s writing a story about how to scare a guy away in 10 days or less. Little does she know, her man of choice, Ben, played by Matthew McConaughey, isn’t going away that easily.

Ben works for an ad agency, and wants to branch out into a new domain: jewelry ads. To prove he’s up to the challenge, he makes a bet to make any girl fall in love with him. His colleagues, knowing Andie is writing her piece, choose the journalist as his target.

To make McConaughey’s reactions to Hudson’s crazy antics more realistic, a lot of them were completely improvised. In the scene where Andie surprises Ben with a new (ugly) dog, she showers him with kisses. The kisses weren’t in the script, so McConaughey was really surprised! But he went with the flow, so the scene worked out.

A lot of the scene when Andie crashes Ben’s “boy’s night” was also improvised. Hudson came up with the idea to throw a plate of veggies onto the poker table during their game, and none of the actors knew this was going to happen, so their shocked faces were genuine.

Isn’t it fun to take a little peek behind the scenes?