| By Fred Topel
In Theaters Friday
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When Jamie Kennedy, coated with green rubber all over his face, picks up a telephone and screams, “Give me back my son!” most of the kids in the audience won’t realize it is a movie spoof. Even the parents taking their kids to see Son of the Mask would be hard pressed to remember the famous line from Mel Gibson’s hit Ransom nearly 10 years ago. Kennedy realizes it is a very limited inside joke.
“I hope more [will get it], but I think about two: me and Mel Gibson,” Kennedy said. “Only certain people really got that.”
Kennedy actually only becomes the green faced Mask character twice in the film. The main story is about the child spawned by the Mask conceiving with his wife. Once the special needs child is born, he uses his live-action cartoon powers to drive dad crazy. Kennedy basically has to spend most of the movie going insane.
“[That was] difficult because movies are shot over months, so I was going crazy for a couple months. And it was very much agghhhhh, like that. It was heightened the whole time and it had to carry through the whole movie, so it was hard to maintain that. I was always tired, but we didn’t have a lot of time for breaks during the schedule, so I would just drink a cup of coffee.”
The insanity involved many physical pratfalls also, including the requisite hits to the crotch. Kennedy admitted he wore a cup, but there was only so much protection he could wear. “You know what, you can’t because it’s there and you’re freaked out that you’re going to get hurt, so you can have a certain amount, but nothing can protect the jewels. [You have to be] pretty brave in a sense. You’ve got to sacrifice your body. I mean, look at the people that are really good at it. They’re amazing because they’ll do anything for a laugh. I’d rather try to do it through a joke than a pratfall.”
Since Kennedy’s humor usually comes from playing characters and messing with people, physical slapstick was new to him. “I wasn’t so much nervous. I was excited. I didn’t realize that physical comedy was so physical. It was so physical that I learned that people that do it make it look easy and it’s not so easy. I wanted to do something that was for family, for kids. There’s not a lot of fun stuff out there for them. I thought this would be good and it’s just different and it has a more broad feel to it.”
Kennedy’s character, Tim Avery, has a job wearing a turtle costume in the lobby of an animation studio. Having gone through several bad jobs in his struggle to succeed in Hollywood, Kennedy could relate. “I used to do singing telegrams and one of them was Bart Simpson. He would sing Happy Birthday. [The turtle] was the hardest costume ever to get in because it was so heavy and everything was so tight and then the head was just like you couldn’t breathe in that thing. I mean, that thing was heavy. That was an insane costume, like bananas. The hardest thing I ever wore.”
Other bad jobs on Kennedy’s resume include “I worked at Pizza Hut, Red Lobster, I used to work at K Mart scraping gum off the floors as a janitor. Telemarketing was always fun.
Outbound, the worst, cold calling. Delivered sandwiches on Sunset in a cart. So you go in a building and you’re the guy that goes, ‘Hey guys, sandwiches are here.’ You think that you ordered something and you didn’t. That guy.”
Now that he’s getting paid to goof around, Kennedy doesn’t think he’ll ever have to grow up for real. “I don't know if my mentality will ever change. My responsibilities might, but I don't know. Hollywood does not breed people to be mature very much. I think that’s how I get my bread and butter is by being kind of youthful.”
That’s not to say that he won’t try drama, but he’s hesitant about possibly sending the wrong message by doing a drama. “I’d love to do that, but when people start saying that, then people are like, ‘Are you going to be all serious and stuff?’ So I really don’t talk like it, but yeah, I’d like to do a drama. It’d have to be a good script though. The whole movie has to be great, just not for me to try to act serious.”
What makes Kennedy laugh are simple things like “people trying not to be funny, people that are clueless, people that are trying to hide the fact that they’re uncomfortable. When something’s really uncomfortable and you can see it, that’s funny to me. Probably things I shouldn’t laugh at are funny. Like in Super Size Me, when Morgan Spurlock threw up, I thought it was so hilarious because it was so wrong.”
Son of the Mask opens Friday. |
