VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Leslie Uggams & Adam Saunders On ‘Dotty & Soul’

Dotty & Soul follows the story of young entrepreneur Ethan Cox (Adam Saunders) as his self-driving car business gets derailed following a Halloween costume scandal. In an effort to save his company, he hires 71-year-old Dotty (Leslie Uggams) to be the company’s public figure. Suddenly, no longer satisfied with being Ethan’s puppet, Dotty starts sharing her own opinions, throwing everyone for a loop.

In an exclusive interview with uInterview founder Erik Meers, Saunders and Uggams sat down to discuss what they learned about each other throughout the movie.

“Working with Leslie was incredible because, you know, obviously she’s a legend of stage and screen and this was the first movie that I was directing,” Saunders began. “On day one, you know, she put me right at ease, but we already had a good report because we had talked a lot before you know she joined the cast, and then of course through the process of prep and stuff, but like that very first day – she’s so present as an actor and she’s just so easy to talk to that when she put me at ease I think she put everybody at ease. So there was a scene that just popped up popped into my mind when we were in the Salomonsky, which is a deli, you know, and it’s a Pretty Woman line, which you probably seen from the trailer, you know, but I was having her improvise all sorts of things. I would have her do it 20 times so she just kept improvising different things, hilarious things every time and I just was so excited at how willing she is to just jump in there and play whatever it is whatever needs to be done, she does that.”

Uggams, for her part, respected in the quality of the script. “Yeah, that was a great scene and we we had a lot of fun and that was, you know, the early scene and I always go by when I’m like learning a script, how people talk naturally but you know sometimes writers have a tendency to write things the words that people don’t really say anymore and everything, and so it was just so easy because he wrote two human beings who really talk and so it was so easy to not even think about the script,” Uggams said. “We had this connection and so wherever he went, I was able to go because he made it easy for my character to do that so we had a lot of fun, a lot of fun.”

Dotty & Soul will be in theaters on May 19, 2023.