The
Next Experiment
Though the phenomenally successful television show of
the same name is now only syndicated in re-runs, the
real Jamie Kennedy Experiment is just beginning. The
experiment? To see if Kennedy can sustain his monumental
rise to fame with his newest endeavor: the lead role
in the sequel to Jim Carrey’s monster 1994 hit,
The Mask. After gaining acclaim in movies such as Scream
and Romeo + Juliet, Kennedy rocketed to stardom in his
WB sketch-comedy-meets-real-life sitcom, the aforementioned
Jamie Kennedy Experiment. Now, with The Mask 2: Son
of the Mask debuting in theaters February 18, he’s
ready to tackle another entertainment genre: the family
comedy. But first: the Superbowl?
When he was 8, Jamie Kennedy faked a heart attack to
turn the momentum of a basketball game his team’s
way. The Philadelphia-raised future star of WB’s
The Jamie Kennedy Experiment and the upcoming film Mask
2: The Son of the Mask says if it came down to it, he
wouldn’t mind if his beloved Philadelphia Eagles
resorted to the same tactics in the upcoming Super Bowl.
“The old quarterback heart attack sneak would
be great,” begins the 33-year-old actor. “You
gotta do what you gotta do to win. When I was on the
floor - I got hit with a ball - I shook the other team
up so much that we threw them out of their game and
we won.”
After having moderate success doing various small movie
roles for the better part of a decade, Kennedy landed
in Wes Craven’s box office record-smashing Scream
movie series. As Randy Meeks, a cynical geek with above
average vocabulary skills, Kennedy not only garnered
a Blockbuster Movie Award for Best Supporting Actor
but gained status as a bit of a pop culture icon. After
subsequently appearing in a handful of movies such as
Three Kings with George Clooney and The Specials with
Rob Lowe, Kennedy parlayed his success into getting
a shot on television with the WB show The Jamie Kennedy
Experiment and he nailed it to the wall.
The show, half Candid Camera and half Saturday Night
Live according to Kennedy, was a fantastic success,
getting the station’s prime showing time on Thursday
evenings at 9 p.m. during its’ first season and
capturing the attention of 3 million rabid viewers.
The show’s following became so tremendous that
by the end of the second season, the joke was up.
“The show’s off the air”, explains
Kennedy. “It’s on rerun on ABC Family every
night, but we’re not shooting any more originals
because we got cancelled. People were seeing it too
much, and they knew it was me. It was hard to fool them.”
In one of the show’s most infamous and ridiculously
funny sketches, Kennedy poses as a Hollywood tour guide
like none other that promises to take fans into the
homes of celebrities. He leads the tour of people into
Bob Saget’s house and shows them around, telling
the tourists he’s allowed inside because he once
worked with Saget on a TV show. Saget shows up unexpectedly
and unleashes some understandable bottled rage on the
group as Kennedy is left to his own devices and the
tourists claim mutiny. Did Kennedy actually think he
could take Saget?
“Oh, no - Bob was in on [the joke]. Bob is a nice
guy, but when he gets angry, I wouldn’t mess with
him. He’d give me a beat down. Don’t mess
with Danny Tanner.”
Kennedy’s previous starring vehicle was 2003’s
Malibu’s Most Wanted, a movie based on a character
he invented on his show and while doing stand-up. Kennedy’s
character Brad Gluckman is a young, rich suburbanite
kid trying start an empire in the rap game as his alter
ego “B-Rizzle”. His father, campaigning
for governor and fearing embarrassment, hires men to
pose as gangsters and scare his son out of his urban
endeavors. Kennedy came up with the character while
cutting his teeth in Hollywood.
“There were so many rich kids... all the kids
in Beverly Hills and Brentwood and Bel Air that talk
like they’re from the ‘hood but have no
street credibility - like ‘what are you talking
about’? That’s where that character was
born. But B-Rad was actually much more likeable.”
Though Kennedy took the opportunity to take a fairly
light-hearted stab at pop emulating culture with Malibu,
he’s actually into hip-hop, and has a seasoned
music palette.
“Kook Keith is amazing - he’s the man. He’s
underground; he refuses to break out. He could be huge
if he wanted. Can’t go wrong with Method Man,
Red Man... there are a lot of dope lyricists out there.
There’s a white kid in LA called Stew the Jew
who’s really good, and coming up. And then you’ve
got your great mainstream people like Eminem and Dr.
Dre. LL Cool J, to me, is one of the most underrated
rappers of all time. He might be the best ever, because
he’s been around forever, he keeps changing up
his style, still has songs in the ‘Top Twenty’
and he’s a dope lyricist. And then there’s
KRS-One, Boogie Down Productions, Big Daddy Kane...”
B-Rad has his own ideas about who’s who on the
hip-hop scene.
“B-Rizzle... the wackest rapper... hm,”
starts Kennedy, in character. “Burt Bacharach.
He’s just gotta get his flow going, know what
I’m sayin’?”
Moving from one obscure medium - hip-hop - to another
in comic books, fans of The Mask movie series will remember
that the concept was originally a comic that was adapted
into the 1994 hit movie. Kennedy himself is familiar
with the comics, and is somewhat of a comic book geek
himself, having played a reformed ex-villain named Amok
in the super hero comedy The Specials and been a lifelong
fan of the greatest underground cartoonist of them all.
“As I get older, I get more into comics,”
begins Kennedy, who plays cartoonist Tim Avery in Son
of the Mask. “My favorites are Crumb comics. R.
Crumb is off the chain. The Adventures of Mr. Natural,
The Devil Lady, all the old Zap stuff. He’s counter
culture, he does insane dark stuff. Those are like,
my favorite comics of all time. If you wanna have super
heroes and all that, it’s cool, but Crumb... he’s
amazing. He’s really perverted.”
As for The Mask comic books, Kennedy’s read them,
but he says the genre and the story’s focus, in
moving from comic to movie to sequel movie, has evolved
and changed quite a bit.
“The Mask comics are very dark - they’re
horror. The first movie was a comedy and this one is
even more of a comedy. This one is more of a family
film with big action adventure with a Roger Rabbit,
Harry Potter-esque feel, and there’s two parts
of this movie: one is very mystical with the gods, Bob
Hoskins and Alan Cummings, and the other part is a domestic
comedy with a lot of special effects,” says Kennedy.
Being expected to fill the shoes of Jim Carrey has been,
as one would expect, a little hard on our hero, especially
as of late, while he’s touring and promoting the
movie’s February 18 release. The questions come
hard and fast about his feelings about the man he ‘replaced’
as The Mask, but just how often?
“Every two seconds of my day,” starts Kennedy,
saying it bothers him “but I knew that going in
it was going to happen so it’s like, ‘whatta
ya gonna do’? - you mess with the bull you’re
going to get the horns. Jim Carrey’s a thousand-pound
gorilla, you know. I’m an ant on his ass. So it’s
like, I’m trying to make this my own thing. Jim
Carrey - before he was The Mask, this was a comic book.
Basically it’s a comic book. Lots of people were
Batman: Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney and
now Christian Bale, and none of them gets [this type
of comparison].
You know, what really gets me is that Steve Martin can
do a remake of Inspector Clouseau and everyone calls
him a genius, and Johnny Depp can do a remake of The
Chocolate Factory and he’s a genius, and I do
a sequel to a Jim Carrey movie that’s totally
different, and I’m considered a weirdo. But I
just stay with it - go with it.”
Kennedy’s been going with it for quite a few years,
as he’s detailed in his book ‘Wannabe: A
Hollywood Experiment’, which starts off with his
Philadelphia upbringing and covers his terrible early
Hollywood moments before pretending to be his own agent
gave him his big break. Accomplishing things like writing
a book, starring in a hit TV show and landing a major
movie role haven’t made him want to settle down
quite yet. So just how similar is Kennedy to his breeding-phobic
Mask alter-ego Tim Avery?
“I’m right up there with Tim, but I’m
probably even more so because I’m not even married,”
Kennedy says. “He’s married, and his wife
wants to have a kid. I’m so not ready to have
a kid, and I don’t want to get married. I think
you have to have a stable unit for a family - you have
to have a girlfriend first. I’m not a playboy,
but someone that likes to enjoy life, and when you have
a kid, you can still enjoy your life, but you have to
be committed to your son or daughter, and you have to
have a spouse, I believe, because my parents are still
married, and it’s almost fifty years. You have
to raise them in a unit so they learn right and wrong,
they learn different values. Now I’m not saying
that divorced kids don’t have great lives. Growing
up for me, I was always in a traditional unit, so that’s
how I’ve always seen it. I think if I did it,
I’d like to have the wife there, and the Sunday
drives. I’m not ready to do that yet.”
Through it all, Kennedy worked relentlessly at staying
true to his own role in The Mask sequel, cartoonist
and reluctant dad, Tim Avery.
“I tried to not watch - I mean, I’ve seen
the first Mask like twenty times, but I tried not too
look at Jim Carrey’s [character] or base anything
on his [character] because then it would’ve been
his. I didn’t want to ‘bite his style’,
as they say. There are certain things you have to do
as The Mask; you know, you’re green, even though
I looked more like ‘Bob’s Big Boy’
or ‘Jolly Green Giant’ with my hair. His
inner id, which the mask brings out, was that he was
a playboy, and when he didn’t have it on, he was
a nerd. My inner id was that I was a guy who didn’t
want to have a kid, and then when I brought the mask
out, I was a super hero saving his son - ‘Super
Dad’ - you know, so I tried to make it different,
but there are going to be some similarity because of
the look of the movie.”
That specific look is one that proved to be difficult
for Kennedy, in that all the variables of the movie
- the special effects, make-up, and animal training
- were things he’d never encountered on such an
elaborate level.
“This movie was like nothing I’ve ever done
in a lot of ways. I mean, I did a lot of running and
action stuff in Enemy of the State, I did a lot of make
up on my show, and I did some improv in Malibu’s
Most Wanted. But this movie... I’ve never had
a co-star that I’ve had to carry, which is the
baby. I ran more than I’ve ever run in a movie,
because my character’s always running. This movie
was hard - it’s not as hard as a regular job -
but it’s hard in that I always had to be at the
height of emotion. So between the props, running with
the real baby, doing scenes with the dog, having to
make sure the dog jumps on me correctly, wearing the
make up, driving that crazy car. It’s a full-blown
crazy-ass adventure that I threw myself in and it was
intense.”
Fortunately, things never got intense enough for the
skinny kid from Philly to fake another heart attack.
Son of the Mask opens Feburary 18.
Check the listings at your local theater for showtimes.
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