‘The Lady of the Manor’: Justin Long, Ryan Phillippe on the supernaturally ‘female bro comedy’

The friendship between a 19th-century ghost and a present-day pothead is unlikely movie fare — until you hear its genesis.

“The idea came from (when) we were smoking some weed,” Justin Long told the Daily News.

The 43-year-old actor, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with his brother Christian, joked that’s “always a good start to a story about an accomplishment that you’ve done.”

The result was “The Lady of the Manor,” the feature-film directorial debut for both Long brothers, which is available online and in select theaters. The movie explores the sensibilities of a modern-day woman, who can barely get a grip on her life, let alone the irritated ghost in the house where she works.

Justin Long is a familiar face in films such as “Jeepers Creepers” and “He Just Not That Into You.” He and brother Christian set out to make a different kind of buddy picture.

“We like the idea of a ghost just being annoying rather than scary,” Justin said of the “female bro comedy.”

“Lady” sees spacey, recently unemployed Hannah (Melanie Lynskey) embracing her role as the tour guide of a historic Savannah manor, which is owned by the family of spoiled man-child Tanner Wadsworth (Ryan Phillippe). She enjoys it until Lady Wadsworth (Judy Greer), whose spirit she’s meant to embody, is grossly offended by her.

Turbulent race relations and plain old racism — both in Lady Wadsworth’s Reconstruction Era and the present day — are nodded to but largely disregarded in this incarnation of the Deep South.

“I’d always been a fan of Justin as a comedic actor and like, his sense of humor and so much of him and his brother are in this script,” Phillippe, 47, told The News. “And so I loved it and this character... was such an opportunity to be silly and to be able to play.

He said that his role left him with “so much freedom and license to just kind of let it rip, you know?”

Phillippe said “there is a connective tissue” between Tanner and his 1999 “Cruel Intentions” character, Sebastian “in the over-the-top nature and you know, someone from a wealthy background who really doesn’t play by the rules or doesn’t think the rules apply to them.”

Before befriending the ghost of Lady Wadsworth, Hannah seeks out the guidance of Max (Justin Long), a professor well acquainted with the history of the house but less so with banishing spirits from a home.

“She doesn’t have a handle on her life. She’s a little bit like, untethered. But she is still really charming,” Long said of the puzzling bond between the characters. “That (chemistry) would have been more of a leap ... if we didn’t have somebody as inherently likable as Melanie playing that part,” he explained.

For all its dealings in the spirit world, fate may have played a role in the film’s completion in the days preceding global lockdowns in March 2020.

“It was so wild to us,” Long recalled. “It came out of nowhere because we had been so consumed with this thing we were making that we hadn’t even been, like, looking at the news.”

Long said that it was at the movie’s wrap party that Phillippe predicted what would happen next.

“He said, ‘You know, the whole world’s gonna change.’ And he just said it so casually,” Long said with a chuckle. “And I remember thinking like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t know Ryan was like, a conspiracy theory guy.’”

According to Phillipe, partygoers did more than think to themselves he was maybe a little out there.

“They all laughed at me!” Phillippe recollects. “And then mid-March, I start getting all these texts from the cast and the crew saying, ‘How did you know?’”

While the pandemic has complicated every facet of life, it did lend a new significance to the film for both Long and Phillippe.

“Everything is so stressful now,” said Phillippe. “I hope that this provides a different kind of distraction. I hope that people can just check out for 90 minutes and have some laughs.”

“There was a greater like, I guess urgency for ... something that was light and fun and just like a diversion from... the world,” Long agreed.

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