Andrew Rannells and Nick Kroll can be seen in the new dark comedy, I Don’t Understand You, from directors David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano. The story is loosely inspired by the directors’ lives and follows a couple trying to adopt a baby during an Italian vacation that has turned upside down. Rannels’ Cole and Kroll’s Dom are stranded and makes a stop at a villa in the outskirts of the city. However, a delightful dinner has turned into death and mayhem.

“Well, I think in this case of our characters, Dom and Cole, [they’re] based in part on the writers and directors David Craig and Brian Crano,” Kroll tells Nerd Reactor. “It’s kind of merging two of their stories of their real lives, what happened to them as a couple, trying to adopt a baby in like a nightmare vacation in Italy.”

As their romantic getaway turns into chaos, they are left stranded in a remote villa. The actors talk about whether they were ever stranded in real life.

“I was in a plane in a crash, and I ended up alone on an island with a volleyball,” Kroll jokingly said about his own stranded story. “I kind of just adapted to living there… Willie Geist is what I named the volleyball.” [Hmmm. This story sounds very similar.]

“I’ve never been stranded,” Rannells said. “I did have sort of the first time I went to Paris with an ex-boyfriend of mine. We were so jet lagged, and we were staying on this really terrible Air BnB. And it took three days for me to figure out, ‘Oh, we should just be drinking more.’ We were doing touristy things.”

One of the film’s poster features Col and Dom smiling with a knife in each of their hand. It’s a taste of their dark adventures together.

“I am embarrassed to say that I was never concerned in reading the script that I was like, ‘Wow, they sure do kill a lot of people,'” Rannells said. “I didn’t bat an eye. They’re trying to get home. They were trying to get to their son, get this baby. Yes, they make some mistakes. Perhaps. Yes, they murder some people, and I was fully on board with it.”

“Who hasn’t murdered some people on vacation?” Kroll added in a sarcastic manner.

“We love the idea of the audience being put in a tense position,” Crano said. “And hopefully by the time things start to go wrong for the characters, they’ve really are on the side of these two guys getting a kid. Then it’s like, ‘What are the worst things that we could force these characters into?’ and create that level of stress for the audience. Yeah, it was really fun to to to play with that.”

“The first act is semi-autobiographical,” Craig said. “We definitely had that moment in making the movie as well.”

About I Don’t Understand You

Synopsis: Dom (Nick Kroll) and Cole (Andrew Rannells), a couple on the verge of adopting a baby, embark on an Italian vacation — the perfect opportunity to reconnect before the new addition arrives. Everything is picture-perfect, the epitome of a European babymoon, when things begin to spiral out of control. Lost on the way to dinner, their car gets stuck in a ditch, leaving them stranded in rural nowhere during a torrential downpour. These two Americans, who are used to being catered to, are now in a foreign land with no cell service, zero comprehension of the Italian language, and, as fear takes over, escalating turmoil that could explode at any moment.

The film is co-written and co-directed by Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig. It’s produced by Joel Edgerton, Nash Edgerton, Kara Durrett, Jessamine Burgum, and Jonathan Glickman. The executive producers are Toby Nalbandian, Gregory Schmidt, Will Greenfield, Ben Shafer, Giovanni Pompili, Lara Costa Calzado, David Joseph Craig, and Brian William Crano.

Starring in the film are Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells, Morgan Spector, Nunzia Schiano, Eleanora Romandini,
Paolo Romano, and Amanda Seyfried.

I Don’t Understand You released in theaters on June 6, 2025.