Jamie Kennedy rapped his way through Malibu’s Most Wanted and now Kennedy shows off another set of skills in Kickin’ It Old Skool, a comedy film co-starring Miguel A Nunez Jr and Michael Rosenbaum. Kennedy plays a breakdancer who slips into a coma in 1986 and wakes up in 2006.
Jamie Kennedy on Why We’re Still Obsessed with the ‘80s: Kennedy shared his opinion on why that decade still holds our interest. “Because it's the last great decade of recognition. What can you remember from the '90s except Nirvana and Pearl Jam? I mean, long hair and grunge and Saved by the Bell. Seriously, what can you pull from there? You can pull from the '80s. You've got amazing John Hughes movies, okay? You've got all those great bands. Remember how many English bands came over, new wave and punk, from Cyndi Lauper to Lou Albano to MTV to Pop Rocks and Coke to roller skating, all that stuff. The fashion. And then you had crack and it was exciting with crack. It added to it.”
A New Spin on B-Rad: Kickin’ It Old Skool’s Justin Schumacher is the next step in the evolution of Malibu’s Most Wanted’s B-Rad. “I figured like I made Malibu's and my fans really liked it, so I thought what else can I do that was in that world? I decided to make a breakdancing movie because I thought that would be like a good bookend. Like the hip hop world of Jamie Kennedy in Malibu's, breakdancing. Then I'll go into my '40s and do something else.”
And what would happen if the two characters ever met? “I mean, you'd have one of the dopest rappers against one of the dopest dancers,” answered Kennedy. “It would be epic. That could be insane: Malibu vs. Encino.”
The Appeal of Breakdancing: “Well, like with Malibu's I loved rap, and I also loved breakdancing. I was in Australia and I saw You Got Served, and I saw people going nuts when they were watching it. I'm like, ‘The dancing is so good but there's no comedy.’ I thought what if you made a dancing movie but with comedy? And then I thought, ‘How come they're not making breakdancing comedies anymore?’ Then I thought, ‘My character should be in a coma.’ And I'm like, ‘Now we're making breakdancing coma-dies, so that's how it was born.”
And Kennedy knows his breakdancing movies. “[I’ve seen] Breakin' at least 12. Breakin' 2, it's hard to watch Boogaloo. They do that whole musical number in the beginning and they're all happy. I mean, they got legwarmers. I mean, I have the lime green legwarmers. I don't have them on now, but they all had legwarmers and that little Mexican kid is all happy. He's too happy. But my movies were Breakin', Wild Style, Krush Groove, Beat Street. Beat Street is hardcore.”
The Hardships of Wearing Breakdancing Outfits: “Well, the thing is I got my parachute pants and I have that outfit upstairs. I was wearing it, but I have to wear this underwear underneath it to keep everything in check. And also, the gloves, I don't know if you can see, they stained my hands.”
Finding New Talent: Kennedy found Jesse ‘Casper’ Lee Brown on Hollywood and Highland [by Grauman’s Chinese Theatre] in Los Angeles. “He breaks every day from three to five. He was doing this crazy breakdance move and I said, ‘Do that again.’ And he did it. I gave him a hamburger and said, ‘Do some more s**t,’ and he did it so I bought him fries. Then I'm like, ‘Do you want to be in a movie?’ He's like, ‘Yeah.’ So then he was in the movie and then he was such a good actor, I said, ‘Well, do you want to act?’
We improv'd some lines and he was good, so that part was written for a 32-year-old and he's him. But the movie is like that. We brought in people. All the shenanigans of Hollywood are stupid. I like to go in and just…I think anybody can be a good actor. It's just a matter of pulling something out of them, so I knew that he was very good. He was going to play the young me but he's too streetwise, so he played the other one. And that's how it is. Like Miguel Nunez, I called him up and said, ‘I need a favor.’ He did it.”
Filming the Dance Sequences: “We kind of overshot the dancing,” said Kennedy. “Like if I were to do it again, I would just use [Jesse ‘Casper’ Lee Brown] and I would say, ‘Give me 10 good moves.’ But we shot so much that it took a long time to edit. But we would shoot wide, we'd shoot close, we shot underneath glass. We had a lot of routines though. It wasn't that hard but he just shot it from a lot of angles so you could cut in and out. But the best, intriguing stuff, I think, is when you see people following through the move all the way through. Like John Travolta, he said when he did Saturday Night Fever they cut in too close and his dancing was not seen, so he was really depressed.”
On the Scream Movies and His Career: “I was in an audition for Charlie's Angels and it was the weirdest room ever,” said Kennedy. “It was Matt LeBlanc, Anthony Michael Hall, me, James LeGros and someone else. Then out from the room came Adam Goldberg. I'm like, ‘Goldie, how you doing?’ He's like, ‘Eh.’ Like that, ‘All right.’ I was like sitting there with Anthony Michael Hall; that's one of the guys I grew up with. I loved him. I still do. He's like, ‘Yo, Scream was like your generation's John Hughes movies.’ I was like, ‘Shut up!’ I go to sleep with that guy on the DVD player and so him saying that was like the biggest compliment ever. So when we did those movies, I felt like I was kind of lucky to be part of that.
Romeo + Juliet kind of started off the teen thing and then Scream really hit it home, so I guess I was lucky to be a part of it. I was definitely lucky to be a part of it and I guess I kind of was because at that time, the horror genre, the last movie was Vampire in Brooklyn and it wasn't really around. And Wes [Craven] was kind of like…he didn't know what the movie was going to be. But we all knew it was cool, it was a matter of [whether] people like it or not.”
