Jesse Eisenberg is the marquee player on director Ruben Fleischer’s action comedy 30 Minutes or Less, playing a pizza delivery guy content with his laidback lifestyle until would-be criminals Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson) knock him out, strap a bomb to his chest and force him to rob a bank in order gain the code to turn off the detonator.
Still, audiences agree that Nick Swardson, best known for his role on the comedy series Reno 911! and his supporting parts in various Adam Sandler movies, delivers the biggest laughs as the kind-hearted but dim-witted Travis.
One of the film’s biggest laughs involves Travis turning Rambo with a flamethrower and Swardson admits that the scene was both awesome and scary to film.
“When I read it in the script, I thought, Awesome!” he said to New York Magazine. “I wasn’t nervous at all, at first. But then I had to do a whole day of fire training. We were shooting in Michigan in August, so it was already really f*cking hot, and I had to put on all these layers, and cooling gel, which is ice cold. And then I got kind of scared. Stuff was blowing up and debris was going everywhere. And all these people were standing by in case anything went wrong, like if something exploded and you burst into flames.”
30 Minutes or Less is in theaters Friday.