I have nothing to say about it. I have no opinion on it because it's not any of my business. I'm the actor. I'm the person that was called up at the last minute and said, "Hey, you wanna come?"
The only thing I'll say about the first movie, because I just figured this out, is that the first movie is a farce. It's not supposed to be real for a moment. It's just this zany farce, which is slightly outdated. But we made a fable and it was clear from the beginning that we were making a fable. A fable is magical and has magical elements to it. And certainly, the conceit or the twist of the movie is this magical thing that happened. But in a fable, you have real storytelling going on with a moral at the end so that it is grounded in some sort of life lesson/reality. So, it's very different from the original movie and the TV movie because both of those were much more into the switch. “Let's see how silly we can be with an adult being a teenager.”
I think, to Mark's credit, and I think a little bit of what I may have brought to the movie was the grounding in reality. Because for instance, the original interpretation of the shrink was way more over the top. I kept saying, "You know what? I've never met a shrink like this. I've never met a patient like. I know you're going for a laugh there, but you're trying to establish this woman is really a doctor. I think you're just going to lose any possibility that people will believe that it's such a ‘jokey’ profession.” At the same time, it's a comedy, so you have to have the patients be funny. You can't have somebody really seriously being sad. But at the same time, I think what I was able to bring to it certainly was a grounding in reality. Any experience I've ever had in any kind of movie I've ever been in - and I've been in a lot of different types - the reason that they work… Well, the reason “The Fog” doesn't work, I don't think, is that it didn't ground you in reality enough. The reason “Halloween” worked is because John Carpenter told us in the beginning that the first 20 minutes of that movie needed to be like you're watching an “Ozzie and Harriet” movie where it's just girls being girls, people walking around, and occasionally this kind of shadow of something pops in. But that it is absolutely mundane, real behavior. Then when you bring in the unreal element, you actually have some rooted interest in the reality that you've created. So in anything I've ever done, I've tried to make sure that that is something we layer in.
Have your kids seen “Freaky Friday?”
Not my son. My little boy, God bless him, he's seven, he was worried that it was scary because it has the word ‘Freaky’ in it and he didn't want to see it. He's seen the ads and he'd laugh when his friends come over and they do the thing where they slam into each other. That's all cute and at one point I said, "Do you want to see it?" And he said, "No. It's freaky." And I said, "No, no, no, honey. It's not freaky like scary freaky. It's freaky like funny silly freaky."
If you switched with your real daughter, what would be the freakiest thing?
To have her legs. If I had her legs, I would walk around in those mini, mini, miniskirts that all the girls sport. I would go to the market in them. I never had her legs, her legs are 15 feet long. That alone, coupled with the fact that she's incredibly bright, is just this wacko combination that I didn't have. I wasn't that bright and so I didn't have that combo which is, as you know, a pretty staggering combo.
