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Features
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Stifler, Southern Style
Ever since he left the ranks of Home Depot employees for the much sweeter inventory of American Pie, actor Seann William Scott has been enjoying life as a young duke of Hollywood.
Friday, August 5, 2005
By Fred Topel
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Theo Wargo/Wireimage.com
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Goofing with the TRL crowd
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If Seann William Scott learned anything during the making of The Dukes of Hazzard, it was to never retaliate in the face of prankish attacks from MTV Jackass co-star Johnny Knoxville.
“That guy’s had everything happen to him,” says Scott with a laugh during a recent interview with FilmStew in New York. “You don’t want to start that game with Johnny Knoxville. He’s been electrocuted, he’s been shot, he’s been cut.”
“He’s been through everything, so it’s like, ‘What could I do that hasn’t happened to him yet?’ So I was like, ‘All right, man, this is what it’s going to be like every day? I’ll take it.’’
In Hollywood’s latest TV update, Scott and Knoxville’s cousins Bo and Luke Duke poke and prod each other as they try to foil Boss Hogg’s (Burt Reynolds) evil plans. And things really weren’t that much different on set with director Jay Chandrasekhar.
“Johnny always showed his testicles to me,” Scott reveals of his co-star’s anything-but-Method maneuvers. “He’d switch it up. Sometimes, he’d have the right one out, sometimes he had the left one out.”
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Theo Wargo/Wireimage.com
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Mr. Testicles
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“You’re literally driving the General Lee thinking, ‘Okay, we’ve got this big stunt I gotta do; if I screw this up, I’m smashing this car into a camera, a person, another car, a tree,’” he continues. “Johnny’s like, ‘Seann, look over here.’ I’m like, ‘Seriously, man, I’m trying to focus here.’ He’s like, ‘I just wanted to see if you looked, and you looked.’ Every day he’d do something like that.”
As a fan of the 1979-1985 series, Scott was intent on putting his own stamp on the big screen version. But in meeting with Knoxville and Chandrasekhar over beers to watch old episodes, there was never any danger of turning this assignment into too much work. “We didn't do any research or anything,” Scott admits gleefully. “It wasn’t like, ‘How do I bring what John Schneider brought to the role?’
“When you cast someone like Johnny and me in the movie, we’re going to make it crazy and weird.”
Add to the mix the improvisational tendencies of Chandrasekhar, whose work with the Broken Lizard comedy troupe includes Super Troopers and the more recent Club Dread, and the mood on set was one of extreme artistic license. “The night before [a scene], I would come up with maybe 15 different ways to play it and also maybe 20 alternate lines,” Scott explains. “Something as simple as the way Johnny reacted to Katie Johnson in the sorority thing.”
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Director Jay Chandraszekhar
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“We never really knew that he didn’t have any game with women,” the 28-year-old Minnesota native continues. “I was like, ‘What if he’s super confident, you get this thing where he’s had this history with this girl and he gets there, faints, can’t talk to her, comes up with a lame joke and obviously the only thing he can communicate with is his car.’”
On the other hand, when it came to performing the movie’s various General Lee-aided stunts, everything was carefully choreographed by Bobby Orr, a world record holder, one-time NASCAR driver and current faculty member of the U.S. Department of Defense, where he teaches the techniques of extreme defensive driving to soldiers on their way to Iraq. “He’s amazing,” Scott marvels. “He actually put the car on two wheels in our film. We worked for about a month [together] using a small Ford and then, when I got to Louisiana , I had to work on the General Lee.”
Although the professional stunt drivers did most of the major automobile work in the film, Scott still has no problem taking credit for a couple of the memorable on-screen moves. “I did about 10 or 12 really great stunts,” he insists. “One of the trickier things to do was drive the car fast on a dirt road, because you’re just constantly fishtailing. [But] you can see pieces of me doing it.”
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Theo Wargo/Wireimage.com
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Following Catherine Bach's jiggle steps
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With Scott now firmly established in the comedy genre, the actor says this was the furthest thing from his mind when moved to the west coast in the mid-1990s. “When I moved out to LA, even though a movie like Chopper hadn’t come out yet, that’s the kind of thing that I was like, ‘Wow!’ he recalls. “You see the real Mark Chopper Reed and you see what Eric Bana did, it’s like they’re pretty much the same guy. So I always wanted to do something like that.”
“When I started off in comedy, I was like, ‘I don't know what I’m going to do.’ I think I can do drama a lot better.”
For now, Scott’s event horizon encompasses the recently wrapped Billy Bob Thornton comedy Mr. Woodcock and a new futuristic comedy-thriller entitled Southland Tales, for which Scott’s blonde Bo Duke locks have since been put to the buzz cut. And through it all, the actor continues to hone in on his own preferred version of this garrulous genre.
“The thing is that I don’t really like comedy that puts other people down,” he says. “The American Pie guy was like that, but I thought what worked was the guy who deep down was kind of insecure and made fun of himself. You know The Office, BBC [version].”
“That show is one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen,” Scott raves. “That guy [Ricky Gervais] is my favorite actor in the world. What he did is so great and I think that was a guy who could have come off saying really inappropriate things, but deep down kind of made fun of himself. Came off like a guy who made fun of himself and that to me I found more endearing.”
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