Brooke Shields stars in the rom-com Mother of the Bride, which premieres on Netflix May 9. Mark Waters directs the film, about a destination wedding in Thailand.
Shields plays Lana, the mother of the bride. Miranda Cosgrove plays her daughter Emma. Emma is to wed the son of a guy named Will, who broke Lana’s heart years ago.
Benjamin Bratt portrays Will.
“What both of those characters were going through was sadness and insecurity,” Shields said on Netflix’s Tudum site. “[Will] felt like he wasn’t going to be enough for her. She felt gutted. And then they both had these full lives and experienced tragedy in different ways. Their relationship is layered, and I was really glad that [Waters] championed that.”
The film shot in Thailand.
Waters’ credits include Mean Girls and Freaky Friday.
He said of Mother of the Bride on Tudum, “It was like an actual destination wedding where you really have nobody to hang out with but the other people in the wedding. We were all living in the same hotels and going to the same restaurant, so everyone naturally became friends.”
The Guardian called Mother of the Bride “middling Netflix mush.”
Variety called it “respectable yet unremarkable.”
The Daily Beast, for its part, described the film as “not a particularly bad movie,” and appreciated Shields' Lana skinny dipping in one scene.
Shields’s film credits include Endless Love, Pretty Baby and Brenda Starr. She was on Broadway in Cabaret and her TV work includes Suddenly Susan.
Hulu premiered the Shields documentary Pretty Baby in 2023.
Another Mother of the Bride was a TV movie in 1993 on CBS, with Kristy McNichol and Rue McClanahan in the cast.
Steve Martin starred in Father of the Bride, which came out in 1991.
