Lexington and Versailles get their close-ups in Drew Barrymore’s new movie

You can see a lot of Central Kentucky in a new movie opening in December but don’t expect to see sweeping shots of horse pastures. Instead, Lexington and Versailles get to pretend to be New York and other locations.

“The Stand In,” a new independent film starring Drew Barrymore that opens Dec. 11 on digital platforms, including iTunes and Apple TV, and in some major market theaters, is set mostly in New York City.

Barrymore plays Candy Black, a famous comic actress who’s growing tired of her career — which requires her to perform stunts like falling face-first into a cow patty — and increasingly trading places with her ambitious stand-in, Paula, also played by Barrymore.

Eventually, Candy decides to bow out altogether, getting her groove back in a small, picturesque town whose stand-ins, so to speak, were found in Central Kentucky.

The movie’s director, Jamie Babbit, shot several scenes near the end of the film in Lexington and Versailles with the help of her brother, Ross Babbit, an executive at Wrigley Media Group, a Lexington-based production company.

“The screenplay calls for a beautiful, charming town where someone goes to find her bliss, so naturally we thought of Lexington and Versailles,” said Jamie Babbit, whose directing credits include episodes of “Russian Doll,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Girls” and “Silicon Valley.”

“Kentucky is the film’s happy ending,” Jamie Babbit said.

With Wrigley Media Group providing the 30-person local crew early last year, the “Stand In” company shot scenes at Lexington’s Old Courthouse, on whose steps Barrymore performed another of her comic stunts; at City Center, then still under construction; at the 21C Museum Hotel Lexington, where several cast and crew members also stayed; at First United Methodist Church on High Street; and at The Amsden coffeehouse and other locations in downtown Versailles.

Perhaps the movie’s signature moment, the cow-patty pratfall, was filmed at Wrigley’s sound stage on Newtown Circle.

The outdoor filming went smoothly, the Babbits said, except for the occasional crowds of fans — including some of about 100 extras in the film selected from nearly 7,000 applicants — who desperately wanted to hobnob with Barrymore. “They really wanted her to sign stuff,” Jamie Babbit said, “but I told her, ‘We’re here to work and we only have a few days.’”

The filming in Central Kentucky grew out of Jamie Babbit’s conversation about two years ago with her brother, who had recently moved to Lexington from Washington, D.C., to join Wrigley Media Group, which provides video production and other services for a number of shows on HGTV and other channels.

“In the last scene, Drew Barrymore’s character decides to retire to a smaller town and open a furniture store, and that’s where Lexington comes into play,” Ross Babbit said. “And as always in filmmaking, you take advantage of every location that you can. Another great thing about Lexington is that there are a lot of places that look like other places, so we were able to film a scene in which Candy is shooting a scene in one of her films on the Old Courthouse steps. Then we went across the street in front of the City Center construction site, which actually doubled as New York City.”

At First United Methodist, the filmmakers shot a scene in the chapel and another in a room that doubled as Candy’s bedroom. (They also shot a scene in Gratz Park that didn’t make the film’s final cut.)

All told, scenes shot in Central Kentucky take up about six minutes in the finished film. The cast also includes T.J. Miller, Michael Zegan, Holland Taylor and Lena Dunham, with cameos by Jimmy Fallon and Graham Norton.

This story was originally published December 11, 2020 at 7:25 AM.