Step Up 2 The Streets star Briana Evigan has basically been preparing for her role as 'Andie' in this movie for the last 10 years. Evigan began her dance training at the age of 9, and at just 11 she took private classes from respected choreographer Shane Sparks. Dancing seems to come naturally for Briana, who makes her acting debut with this sequel to Step Up. The daughter of actors Greg Evigan and Pam Serpe, Evigan’s hoping to add more acting credits to her resumé although her first love is dance.
“Dancing, to me, is a way of expressing myself and getting out either really great emotions or really bad emotions, or whatever it is,” said Evigan of her love of dance. “I actually started off as a gymnast when I was very, very young, and I think that is what led me into the dancing. I would just do it in my house and around my parents, and would shake my butt all over the place. I just fell in love with it when I was very young.”
Although she’s trained in hip-hop, salsa, African, ballet and jazz, working with choreographer Dave Scott gave her a case of the nerves. “I clicked right away with [choreographer] Jamal Sims and Rhapsody, who is his assistant, and their dancing. They helped me get even a little bit bigger than I was. I really started with a lot of street hip-hop, so their choreography was a little bit more like Shane’s for me. I continued taking with Shane my whole life. And then, when I walked into the room with Dave Scott, I was so scared because he does a lot of popping and I had never done that before. I had to retrain all of my muscles to remember how to use them the way he did. It was crazy. And watching him is so intimidating.”
And speaking of different moves, Evigan’s not afraid to show off her sexy side in dance numbers. However that approach wasn’t necessary for Step Up 2 The Streets. “For this movie, they really wanted me to cut back on my sexiness because I just had a dance company, called E-Funk, right before the movie and we had a real sexy hip-hop thing going on. So right when I got there, they were like, ‘Get rid of the sexy. Get like a man. You have these baggy pants on. Get ghetto.’ They definitely put a limit on my dancing in the movie.”
The scene in Step Up 2 that audiences will probably be talking about the most is the dance sequence in the rain. The actors were soaked and at times freezing, and Evigan even had a big metal brace on under her wardrobe due to a leg injury. Despite all that, Evigan says dancing in the rain wasn’t as difficult as she assumed it would be. “I was very worried that it was going to be,” confessed Evigan, “but it was so fun and our adrenalin [was going], and everybody was so pumped up. The rain would come on and we’d all start jumping. We were so excited, every time. We knew this was the end and we were about to be finished filming, so I think everybody really pushed through.”
Pushing through was easier to do because of her working relationship with co-star Robert Hoffman. “We had great chemistry. I had to do a chemistry test with him, in my last audition, and we instantly clicked. We had to come up with a little salsa piece together for the audition. We absolutely clicked. He’s a very nice guy and very talented and very cool.”
And kissing him wasn’t a bad day at work either. “We had gotten so comfortable over the three months that we were there, and that was the end of the shoot,” said Evigan. “It was exciting. I had never done an on-screen kiss or anything. And kissing is personal, so I was a little nervous. But we were definitely comfortable together.”
Evigan also admits to be extremely nervous about watching her first film, but wound up proud of herself and the way the film turned out. Evigan believes editing the dance sequences must have been a difficult task but thinks the editors handled it well. “It’s hard because we did so much more choreography than what was in there,” said Evigan on the cuts that had to be made in order for the movie to fit together. “It’s crazy when we see it all chopped up and half of it is missing, and it’s in a different part of the movie now, or something. But, it was really cool. I love the way they put it together. I think the editors and John Chu had great direction through the whole thing. I thought they really did an unbelievable job, and I think all the dancers were very happy.”
Step Up 2 The Streets may be Evigan’s first film role, but she's been involved in dance for over a decade and has some advice to share with wannabe dancers. “Keep going because it is so competitive. I think people get very discouraged going into auditions because of how great the people are. Having B-boys and B-girls around, with as popular as they are now, they go into an audition, and they ask you to freestyle at the end of whatever you’ve learned and it’s intimidating because your freestyle does not look like that. And that’s the way it was for me. I could do some simple break-dancing moves when I got the movie, but before that it was like, ‘Wow!’ That’s just so cool to watch that it intimidates you. But you’ve just got to remember that that may not be what they’re looking for. They’re always looking for something so specific that they already know, when you walk in the room, if you’re the girl or guy or not.”
