Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass About this episode Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a comedy, but it’s mostly a very funny hang. Zoey Deutch plays a small town hairdresser whose fiancee has just had sex with the celebrity on his sex pass list. She's determined to do the same – with Jon Hamm. She sets off to Hollywood to find him and gathers a motley crew along the way. The film was directed by David Wain, also is known for Wet Hot American Summer.
For other goofy comedies, check out these episodes:
'Jackass: Best and Last' looks back, misty-eyed, at a legacy of mayhem https://www.npr.org/2026/06/29/nx-s1-5871313/jackass-best-and-last-looks-back-misty-eyed-at-a-legacy-of-mayhem
‘Stop! That! Train!’ goes off the rails in a good way https://www.npr.org/2026/06/15/nx-s1-5855439/stop-that-train-goes-off-the-rails-in-a-good-way
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.
0:19 Speaker 01 Do y'all remember the movie Wet Hot American Summer? How about the sketch comedy series The State? Well, the folks behind those things, and a lot of other very funny things, have come together to make a deeply goofy comedy called Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass.
0:34 Linda Holmes? Boy, it is goofy. It's about a small-town gal who comes to Hollywood and has an adventure involving a lot of celebrity cameos and even more dumb jokes. I'm Linda Holmes.
0:45 Speaker 01 And I'm Glen Weldon. And joining us today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour are our co-hosts, Aisha Harris. Hey, Ayesha.
0:51 Aisha Harris? Hello, hello.
0:52 Speaker 01 And Stephen Thompson. Hey, Stephen. Hello, Glenn. Hey. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a comedy, but it's mostly a vibe. It stars Zoe Deutsch as a sweet Kansas hairdresser who heads to Hollywood. Gail's fiance has just had sex with the celebrity on his sex pass list, so Gail's determined to do the same thing with Jon Hamm. Along the way, she meets an agent, played by Ben Wong, and a paparazzo, played by Ken Marino, but there's also an evil criminal anarchist or something on their trail. If that description leads you to believe that there's a steel trap plot to follow here, remember what I said about it being a vibe. This is a hang-up movie. It features lots of great people and some very random cameos. Put it this way, it's the kind of movie that features a crazed, gun-toting Weird Al Yankovic
1:37 Speaker 01 as himself, and you're just like, hmm, sure. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is in theaters now. Ayesha, what'd you think?
1:45 Aisha Harris? Oh, man. I mean, as you've already said, this is a weirdo movie. It's a movie set somewhere over the rainbow, in the bizarro world of La La Land. Do all the jokes land? No. But I think that the energy, the gameness, the yes-and-ness of all the performers here, especially Zoe Deutsch, especially Miles Gutierrez, Riley, and Ben Wong, I just very much enjoyed this. And it tickled my senses, and it just made me really happy. I had a smile on my face the whole time I was watching this movie.
2:18 Speaker 01 Cool. I think you said the magic word, "gameness." That is on display throughout. Steven, I think you probably like this. I'm guessing you probably like this. Did you like this?
2:28 Stephen Thompson? I mean, look, it's funny.
2:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:30 Stephen Thompson? It really is as simple as that. There is a very clear metric that you can use when you're watching any comedy. And that's just, did I laugh? Did I laugh more or less from start to finish? Absolutely. Is there a shagginess, a silliness, a slight kind of disposability to it? Does it feel like a little bit more of a streaming hang than a get a sitter and go out to the theater and see it on a big screen hang? To me, it leans more on kind of the streaming side of things, but I also want to support this movie. I want to support more movies like this being made. Just give me a fun 90 minute hang full of laughs.
3:08 Stephen Thompson? And I think that unlike a lot of comedies of this sort, I think this movie actually gets funnier as it goes along. And I think that there are some big laughs in this film's final moments. And very often, movies like this kind of front load the laughs and then they have to go through all these plot mechanics. But as you said, Glenn, the plot, not super critical to this film. This film gets its plot underway within the first 10 minutes. And very often it's just like, here's some exposition for you. Just like get to the laughs and this movie gets to the laughs.
3:45 Speaker 01 Okay. Wow, man, you said a lot of things I want to come back to, but first, Linda, let's hear from you. What'd you make of this?
3:50 Linda Holmes? Yeah, I really like this too. It's a lot of fun. This is your, you know, all the things you mentioned, the state, what hot American summer. This is also to me in the realm of your pop star, Never Stop, Never Stopping.
4:03 Stephen Thompson? High praise.
4:04 Linda Holmes? Stuff like that. Yeah. And I might not love it quite as much as that one, but I, did I enjoy this? Did I have a great time? Yes, I did. Were there things where I thought, oh, that's really funny and clever and I, and I love that joke? Yes. Is this something I'm going to return to? Probably not. Right? And I had the same reaction, you know, people loved Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar so very much. And I watched it and I enjoyed it and I've rarely thought about it again, which a lot of people are not like that. They've thought about it many times and rewatched it many times.
4:32 Stephen Thompson? Aisha among them.
4:33 Aisha Harris? I am one of those people. I love Barben Star.
4:35 Linda Holmes? Exactly. And that's more how I am closer to being like that with Popstar. I have rewatched Popstar. With this one, probably it's, you know, I watched it. I'm probably gonna forget about it. But I did enjoy watching it a lot when it was happening. And I think what I appreciate about it is it does have a very specific point of view and commitment. I agree with Stephen that it remains funny throughout. I still think movies like this, and this is, they brought this in at just about an hour and a half. It's not over long. But I actually probably with things like this would rather do like an hour. For me personally.
5:11 Stephen Thompson? Can you make a 60 minute movie? Yeah.
5:15 Linda Holmes? It's just more that for me personally, that's about the ideal length of time. An hour is about the ideal length of time for this kind of very jokesy kind of a point of view and an angle. That's where it starts to drop off for me, no matter how good it is, right? But at the same time, there's a lot of people who are terrific in this. There are certainly some people we're not going to talk about, but I think you can talk about all of the cast members you've already mentioned. Can we talk about John Slattery? We can talk about John Slattery.
5:44 Stephen Thompson? Oh, sure.
5:45 Aisha Harris? Oh, yeah.
5:45 Linda Holmes? John Slattery, who of course worked with Jon Hamm on Mad Men, comes into this movie and boy, makes his presence known feels like a, feels like a gross understatement of the commitment.
5:57 Stephen Thompson? Committed to the bit. He is committed to the bit.
6:00 Aisha Harris? Fully, fully.
6:01 Speaker 01 This is commit to the bit, the movie.
6:02 Linda Holmes? I so admire the way that Ken Marino is always Ken Marino in a way.
6:07 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
6:08 Linda Holmes? And yet I consistently find it delightful.
6:11 Stephen Thompson? Always.
6:11 Aisha Harris? Yes.
6:12 Linda Holmes? Even though he is always kind of that dude. I wasn't so familiar with Ben Wong, thought he was great in this.
6:19 Stephen Thompson? Oh, he's in Karate Kid Legends.
6:21 Linda Holmes? I thought he was great in this. Really good, really, really funny. You know, like I said, we don't want to spoil too many of the cameos, but there are a lot. And there are people where I was like, I'm impressed about that person to do this particular thing they're having them do.
6:34 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
6:35 Linda Holmes? And then a couple that are just, the ones that I most wouldn't spoil are some that are just like total throwaways. And it's just, what?
6:43 Linda Holmes? And I appreciated this as well. So am I going to go back and think about this movie a whole lot more times? Probably not. Did I enjoy it greatly? Yes, I did.
6:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, boy, when our camps are so close together, it's it's tough for me to pick one to be in. But I'm gonna go with Linda here. I mean, I am so favorably inclined to this movie and absolutely everybody in it. I love everything it represents to me, maybe more than the movie itself, because it represents to me a lot of performers I have loved for years and years and years getting back together to have a great time in what is clearly their own backyards, you know, on the cheap. I mean, there is there's the Gilmore Girls downtown set from the back lot of Sub Studio. And, you know, they made an actual movie here, a movie that doesn't have much to say and is rightly proud of the fact that it has nothing to say. I had a good time, but here's where we differ. I didn't laugh.
7:33 Stephen Thompson? Oh, wow.
7:34 Speaker 01 I grinned affably throughout it.
7:36 Linda Holmes? But here's the thing, I almost never laugh at home. Like, I almost never laugh out loud at home. And here's where I would differ slightly with Stephen. I agree with Stephen that the tone of this and the feel of this is more streamingy. But I also really like seeing silly comedies in theaters with crowds. And I actually suspect that if I had seen it in a theater with a crowd, I might have laughed out loud more than I did. Because at home, I tend to just go like, huh.
8:04 Speaker 01 That's pretty good. I make my own crowd.
8:07 Linda Holmes? I know you do.
8:09 Speaker 01 Look, this is a shaggy movie, as you mentioned, and I don't know if it was anything that I normally look for. If it was crisper, tighter, sharper, faster, more honed, it wouldn't be this movie.
8:20 Linda Holmes? Right, right, right, right.
8:21 Speaker 01 This movie is loose and shaggy and dumb and silly. It goes for the joke. It will shatter the reality of a scene and just kind of keep tromping through the wreckage of that scene. And that's fine. It's not going to stick with me. I'm not going to return it the way I've returned to Barben Star and returned to Popstar. I think they're in a different echelon for me. It's perfectly fine.
8:40 Linda Holmes? Yeah.
8:41 Stephen Thompson? I think it's maybe more in a tier with something like Weird, the Al Yankovic story.
8:45 Speaker 01 Okay, that makes sense.
8:46 Stephen Thompson? Where it's like shaggy and silly, eventually kind of runs out of things to comment on, but is having fun along the way, makes some similar tonal shifts, and is not like ultimately major. And they both have Weird Al Yankovic.
9:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, always great to see Weird Al. We have some more thoughts about Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pest. But first, let's take a quick break.
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10:22 Speaker 01 Welcome back. Aisha, you were pretty enthusiastic about this movie. Tell us more about why you think people should give it a chance.
10:28 Aisha Harris? I'm going to, not full-throatedly, but a little softly defend this movie a bit.
10:33 Speaker 01 You're nuts.
10:33 Linda Holmes? I don't think you have to defend it. I think we're picking around the edges of something we all enjoy.
10:38 Aisha Harris? Fair, and I guess this is where it gets hard to talk about comedy, because comedy is so, like even more than most things, it's so subjective. And it's like, we're not all going to laugh at the same things. I will say, like, yes, it's shaggy, but it still does have sort of, I mean, if you want to really reach for it, I think it does have some commentary around both LA. It's super, it's very super like LA inside jokes, whatever.
11:03 Speaker 01 Sure.
11:03 Aisha Harris? But also, there's the entire theme of The Wizard of Oz, which is not at all subtle.
11:08 Linda Holmes? Yes.
11:08 Aisha Harris? But I think is deployed in interesting and fun ways. And while The Wizard of Oz, of course, has been done to death, like every Western genre has some. How riffed on The Wizard of Oz. It is, it's just part of the lexicon. It is part of the culture. I do think that the way that it kind of implants it into this story and uses these characters as very obvious analogues for those original characters in the movie and in the book. I don't know. I just found it really delightful. And I do think that even when the jokes don't land, the commitments, like I was happy to see not only the people that we're all familiar with, but also the newcomers here who I think get some really great lines. And like, it's all about the delivery, right?
11:52 Aisha Harris? The first time I saw this was with, at Sundance with a crowd. And it was a different experience. It was a communal experience. Obviously, there's no, like, I'm sure there are plenty of people who were still like, huh, it's, it's fine. But it did get a lot of laughs. And I think that just the idea of this very basic idea of something that we all, well, maybe not all. But like, many of us have partaken in or talked about is like the celebrity sex pass. Like, who would your person be? Just taking that germ of an idea and then running with it in the silliest way possible. That was all I wanted. And yeah.
12:26 Stephen Thompson? Treating that as the central quest is funny. Treating it like as a quest movie instead of as like a rom com.
12:32 Aisha Harris? Oh, yeah.
12:32 Stephen Thompson? If I may pick apart sort of the comedic DNA of this film, I think one reason that Aisha and I may have been the biggest fans of this movie on this panel is for me, I felt a consistent kind of Tina Fey, Robert Carlock, unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt vibe to some of this comedy.
12:50 Aisha Harris? Very much.
12:51 Linda Holmes? I get that.
12:51 Stephen Thompson? And if that's kind of your bag, if that's the feel that you like in a lot of your comedy, this film I felt like was speaking that language with a little bit of like Brooklyn Nine-Nine DNA kind of sprinkled throughout. Plus, the co-writer and director of this movie is David Wayne, who worked on Wet Hot American Summer. You get a sense of just sort of the comedic sensibility that we're working with here.
13:15 Linda Holmes? Yeah, I want to make clear, my reaction to this movie is not like, eh, it's fine, right?
13:19 Aisha Harris? Of course not.
13:19 Linda Holmes? It's just, I really enjoyed it. It's just that when you get, when you're trying to figure out, as you said, Aisha, how to talk about comedy, it's like you start to think about like, Why is one thing something that you find funny and watch over and over again? Whereas something else is maybe something funny that you watch once? I agree with you about the Wizard of Oz. Obviously, the Wizard of Oz thing, as you said, is not subtle. They're not hiding it, particularly toward the end. They really give you a pretty clear Wizard of Oz situation. And for that reason, it also, I think, has a lot of Muppet movie.
13:48 Speaker 01 Oh, sure.
13:49 Linda Holmes? Because the Muppet movie, of course, has a lot of Wizard of Oz in it in the sense that you're going on this quest and you're kind of picking up people along the way. To me, because of the tone of it, there's a lot of Muppet movie. I really did feel quite a bit of like how they pick up Gonzo and they pick up Miss Piggy. And it's sort of like, well, everybody who wants to come, sure, why don't you come with us? And that comes up.
14:13 Speaker 01 Nobody's got anything going on in this movie.
14:16 Linda Holmes? And that comes up over and over again with people where they run into somebody on this journey and it's like, sure, well, why don't you come with us? And I do enjoy that. I think that's a really fun structure for a movie like this. And I think they make pretty much across the board, great choices in choosing, in casting the people who become part of that sort of traveling gang as they go out to LA and try to find poor Jon Hamm. I say poor Jon Hamm only because he does become something of a cartoon in this movie.
14:44 Speaker 01 Intentionally.
14:45 Linda Holmes? Yes. But intentionally so. It is certainly not the first time that we have learned that he is a game individual. There are some other game individuals that maybe I was a little less expecting and enjoyed that a great deal. It's a lot of fun. I definitely recommend it. And part of me does want to tell people to try it in a theater because I am curious about whether I would have cackled more full-throatedly.
15:09 Speaker 01 I was thinking about this movie and my reaction to it. And it occurred to me that there are just performers in your life who get a pass, not a sex pass, but just like they get grandfathered into your life, right? They did something you loved at some point in the past. And now with every project that comes down the road, they're always going to start on third base.
15:29 Linda Holmes? Yeah. But not in a sex pass.
15:30 Speaker 01 Not in a sex pass. This is one of the things that spending decades consuming pop culture does to you. And I think my instinct as I age, and I don't think you guys will like this, but as I age into senescence. And as a critic, my instinct is to narrow that aperture and let fewer things in and be less open. And that's something I feel like I have to fight, but it's so good to be reminded this is unofficially a reunion of the state. I think pretty much every member of the state gets a little thing to do. And it's just like, oh, I miss the state and I miss these guys and they're still together and they're hanging out together and they're clearly having a great time.
16:03 Stephen Thompson? It's a reunion of your college buds.
16:05 Speaker 01 It's exactly it. It feels like that, although I wouldn't get together with my college buds if you paid me, but I would. Yeah, but like, I don't know, it's enough. I didn't yuck it up. In the way I did with some other very silly comedies that are out this summer, but like, I still had a great time. And what's wrong with a great time?
16:21 Stephen Thompson? Nothing.
16:22 Aisha Harris? Nothing, especially if you get to have Jon Hamm be game and also John Slattery in a little. It's also a little Mad Men reunion, which is, which is very fun.
16:32 Stephen Thompson? Exactly. I do just want to throw in one more good word for Zoe Deutsch, who you talk about gameness and you talk about commitment. I think she's really, really funny in this movie and I really appreciate the way this seems like it's going to be kind of a one note cheerful. She's naive and then this film lets her get weird in ways that I really appreciated.
16:56 Aisha Harris? I agree.
16:56 Stephen Thompson? I think she's super, super funny at the center of this movie. This movie isn't just a gathering of people I already knew and liked. I think this is a really, really fun performance at this film's center.
17:08 Aisha Harris? Yeah.
17:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:09 Linda Holmes? Yeah, wouldn't be the Muppet Movie without Kermit the Frog.
17:11 Stephen Thompson? That's right.
17:12 Speaker 01 There you go.
17:13 Aisha Harris? It's very Eli Kemper in Unbreakable, Kimmy Schmidt in many ways.
17:18 Stephen Thompson? Absolutely.
17:19 Aisha Harris? I also do want to really quickly shout out the character of Terrence, who's played by Toby Wyndham. He's playing Jon Hamm's bodyguard, I guess, or security guard or whatever. He doesn't have too many things on his credits as far as I could tell looking, but he's very great delivery, very fun. Has a repeated gag that I think really works and just again, he comes in kind of later in the movie, but injects more energy into the movie. That's if one thing doesn't land for you, something else might by the end of this film. And that to, as Linda has already pointed out, that's like a ringing endorsement of a movie in and of itself. So.
17:54 Stephen Thompson? Yeah.
17:55 Aisha Harris? Sex pass. Yay.
17:57 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Listeners, do not get it twisted. We all like this movie. We all are more, I think, more to the point. We are all encouraging you to go see it in the theater if you see it. All right. Well, that brings us to the end of our show. Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson, Linda Holmes, thank you so much for being here.
18:13 Stephen Thompson? Thank you.
18:14 Aisha Harris? Thank you.
18:14 Linda Holmes? Thank you, buddy.
18:15 Speaker 01 This episode was produced by Hafsa Fatima and Mike Katsevich, edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy, and Al Ockman provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.
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18:52 Speaker 06 This week on Up First, we're in the final days before the midterm elections, and this is one of the wonderful things about politics, one of the wonderful things about humanity. We have all this data, we have all this information, and nobody really knows what's gonna happen. We're gonna follow it day by day through Election Day and beyond. And you can listen to Up First every morning on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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