Elijah Kelley Can Almost Fly: Or so it appears in one dance scene in Hairspray. “That was not CGI. That’s was me. That was the energy of my first day shooting. That was the nerves. That was the jitters; that was everything. I didn’t even know how high I jumped. I black out when I perform. I do. You give it all to the people that you’re performing to and I just totally blacked out. When I saw the movie I didn’t remember half the stuff in that opening scene that I did or how it came out. You don’t get an immediate reaction. You don’t immediately get to see the product. So it’s like, ‘Wow.’”
On Training to Dance: The high-energy numbers took a lot of work to get right but they all knew it would be tough going into the project. Bynes said, “For us it was a part of the audition. I remember I first auditioned and I sang a song from the musical. And then the second audition I had to sing a song and I had to learn a dance, which I ended up not even being in that number. But they put me through the hardest dance training. I remember it was really hard to memorize. It was not only like legwork but you had to do like matching arm things, and I’m not even in that number. But it was intense. And then during the movie we trained by dancing all the time.”
Kelley added, “It’s funny because we actually went out and researched when we went out to clubs. So that was a nice thing to go out and dance and say, ‘I was just working on my moves last night.’”
The cast practiced their '60s moves in clubs and didn’t care how the public responded. Snow didn’t even care about walking around in costume. “I remember one day it was a long day, I’d been working like 11 hours. I had some time off so I couldn’t take off my hair and make-up because I was doing another scene. I went to get Starbucks with my friend who came to visit me. I went with my Penny hairdo and my outfit and I think people were like [looking at me strangely]. But I think nowadays people dress so oddly anyway.”
Calling Queen Latifah ‘Mom’: Queen Latifah plays Kelley’s mother Motormouth Maybelle in the movie and Kelley couldn’t have been happier about that bit of casting. “That was the best and coolest thing, you know what I’m saying? She’s like really, really like the big homey now,” joked Kelley. “During the movie she was just so influential in the way I viewed all the racial situations and just how I played my character. Her biggest thing was to me to just be yourself and pull through your own personal values because she’s been around since – doing music, writing hip hop music and doing urban movies like House Party. She had her own show and Chicago, which she got nominated for an Oscar, and through all of that her career has escalated but her personality has been a constant great thing. I think that’s one of the things I took from her. All of the older people really walked the walk, as they say.”
Bringing the 1960s Back to Life: Kelley offered up his theory on why audiences will come out to theaters to see a film set 40 years ago. “Amanda Bynes is going to bring children to this movie. Zac Efron is going to bring millions of girls to this movie. Brittany Snow has such a fanbase. I’m piggybacking on their fans. I just hope that that happens. I mean, when you have people like that I think more people come. I mean, you guys got to grow up with John Travolta and Michelle [Pfeiffer] and watch them grow old. My generation got to watch them, so it’s a perfect bridging of the gap with ages and races and everything.
It’s like a universal film. I love Transformers. I’m going to see Transformers but I think we have something up on everybody. Like my grandmother, ‘Oh, Transformers is too loud! I can’t go see Transformers.’ But she can come see Hairspray, and vice versa. There’s something for everybody.”
Working Together on Hairspray: The two co-stars say that actually liking each other helped a lot. “Well Amanda is a wonderful person, first of all. That doesn’t hurt the working process at all,” said Kelley. “She’s a beautiful person inside and out.”
Bynes added, “I think we all really wanted to do a good job in the movie and so we were dedicated to doing the best we could do. And Adam Shankman, who’s the director of the movie, he sort of set the tone for the movie. He told everyone, ‘You can’t be late. You have to be your part.’ I think we did become our characters. And as far as working together it was easy because everybody was nice and nobody was jaded. Even with the veterans there were no egos. I think because they were doing something that they weren’t familiar with – even though John Travolta’s obviously famous for singing and dancing in Grease and whatnot – it had been a long time. I think that everybody was sort of… It wasn’t something that we were all so confident in, the dancing.”
And Speaking of John Travolta: Travolta cross-dresses in a large fat suit in the film and both Kelley and Bynes loved working with him. “It was really great working with him. He had to stay in the whole outfit,” said Bynes. “He didn’t talk in his lady voice off set but other than that, he’s a really nice guy. He was a trooper. You have no idea how hard it is in that thing and he’s singing and dancing.”
Laughing, Kelley recalled, “Everybody wanted to touch it and feel it. When he took it off, I took it home and laid with it.”
