Kathryn Hahn Says Some of Her Naughtiest and ‘Darkest’ Bits in Step Brothers Were Improvised

Kathryn Hahn is revisiting some of the wildest improvisations that made it into Step Brothers — and some that didn’t.

The Agatha All Along star, 51, was Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s latest guest on his podcast Dinner’s On Me, where he pumped Hahn for details about the unscripted moments in the 2008 film.

Step Brothers, directed by The Big Short Oscar winner Adam McKay, centers on Brennan (Will Ferrell) and Dale (John C. Reilly), two middle-aged man-children who become step brothers when their parents (Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins) marry. Hahn plays Alice, Brennan’s sister-in-law who develops a hilariously obsessive attraction to Dale after he punches her husband Derek (Adam Scott).

“That was, like, also such a specific time in comedy,” Hahn told Ferguson of making the film. McKay, she said, “wrote something genius and hilarious, I think, with Will, that you could just do that. But then they would always, you know, do that thing where it was like, ‘Okay, now throw it away and let’s just roll.’ ”

Hahn has spoken previously about how much improvising happened on the Step Brothers set. “We would do it once as written, and then we would go off. And sometimes it would have zero to do with any story that was on the page,” she told Vanity Fair in 2021.

“There was room for actual new scenes to happen,” she said on Dinner’s On Me, admitting that sometimes she would make a list of potential gags to do on set the next day.

In fact some of the film’s raunchiest scenes were improvised, including one in which Alice tells Dale she’s going to pleasure herself thinking about him punching her husband, adding that she wants to “roll [him] up into a little ball and shove [him] up [her] vagina.”

“That whole scene, like, when I tell him I’m gonna shove him in my vagina,” she told Ferguson, “That was all not really in the script.”  

“I mean, that came from the deep recesses of a recovering Catholic,” Hahn joked.

Ferguson, 49, had several questions about another memorable scene in which Alice and Dale have sex for the first time standing up in a men’s bathroom. Afterward, Alice, foot still planted in the bathroom sink, tells Dale that their love making was “just the way I imagined it.”

“Okay. That’s probably me,” Hahn admitted of the line.

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She couldn’t take credit for another absurd moment in which her character hikes up her skirt and pees in a urinal. “That was our first AD,” she said. “He suggested it, and I was like, ‘Brilliant.’ ”

In her 2021 Vanity Fair career breakdown, Hahn also spoke about a murder plot she and Reilly improvised during their bathroom scene, which didn’t make it into the film. “I mean, John C. Reilly and I, our story could have been so much darker than what was ultimately on camera,” she said at the time.

In her chat with Ferguson, she revealed who their intended victim was.

“So, like, we you know, in that bathroom, like, we were plotting Adam Scott’s murder,” she said. “Like, we went down the darkest rabbit [hole]. Like, so dark.”