Never settling: 'Scrambled' a journey to find the one — even its yourself

Leah McKendrick is used to being busy.

When she began the process of creating the script for “Scrambled,” it was about writing from what she knows.

As production was set to begin, McKendrick not only was set to star, but also direct the project.

“It was all so fresh for me,” she says. “I knew that I had to write this film.”

“Scrambled” tells the story of quintessential eternal bridesmaid Nellie Robinson, played by McKendrick, who constantly finds herself between weddings, baby showers and bad dates. When she begins to feel like the clock is ticking and is faced with bleak romantic prospects, Nellie decides to freeze her eggs — setting her on an empowering journey to a brave new world where she ultimately discovers “the one” she’s looking for might be herself.

The feature film will begin playing in theaters on Friday, Feb. 2. It will play at Century Rio 24, Cottonwood, Icon Cinema and Winrock 16 in Albuquerque.

McKendrick’s journey began at South by Southwest Conference & Festivals in 2017, when she premiered her first film as a writer.

In 2021, McKendrick was single at 34, heartbroken and isolated in a pandemic, she decided to freeze her eggs.

“It was a lonely ride — an existential one (EGGSistential?),” she quips. “Harvesting my eggs meant confronting my own mortality. It meant struggling to flick air bubbles out of syringes, then Googling ‘can air bubbles kill me?’, filling out paperwork with a box checked: If you drop dead, should your eggs be tossed, donated to science or left to your little sister? Post-injection every night, I would play a fun game I liked to call: Am I lightheaded, or are my organs shutting down?”

McKendrick was also forced to reckon with something scarier than death itself — the ideals of womanhood.

Never settling: 'Scrambled' a journey to find the one — even its yourself

“As a woman, you are expected to be eternally youthful, fertile and untapped, yet sexually available — but only with your person,” she says. “But what if you don’t have a person? Why don’t you have a person? Find your person, but don’t settle.”

McKendrick says as she stood alone in her apartment injecting her belly with hormones, this is where she thought about making a movie.

“The loneliness/confusion/freedom/panic of being a single and childless woman in her mid-30s,” she says. “I thought I was living a full, colorful existence of dream chasing. I’d never settled for anyone else’s life — why did I feel like an epic failure?”

McKendrick assemble a cast including Ego Nwodim, Andrew Santino, Adam Rodriguez, Laura Cerón, Clancy Brown, Yvonne Strahovski, June Diane Raphael, Noah Silver, Sterling Sulieman, Max Adler, Mimi Kennedy, Camille Mana and Matt Pascua.

“Ego is great on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and I knew she would be perfect,” she says. “All of the other actors came together at the right time. Making all those calls took time, but it all worked out.”

McKendrick hopes that her story will help others feel not so alone.

“It was a journey to acknowledging that I have to love myself,” she says. “No matter what people say, I’m the one who is there for me.”