JAY & SILENT BOB REBOOT
LAST YEAR, KEVIN SMITH ALMOST DIED AFTER A CARDIAC ARREST. BUT THAT DIDN’T STOP HIM FROM REVIVING HIS MOST BELOVED CHARACTERS FOR JAY & SILENT BOB REBOOT, A SLACKER COMEDY FUELLED BY REAL EMOTION
Just over a year ago, Kevin Smith almost died. Thankfully he didn’t, and now he’s back, strong like bull, and bringing his most beloved characters with him.
HOLLYWOOD DRIVE, DESPITE its name, is about the last place on Earth you’d expect to see a movie being made. A quiet residential street in Metairie, Louisiana, part of the New Orleans metropolitan area, it’s about 2,000 miles away from your actual Hollywood.
Yet on this sunny March day, a movie is being made here. You can tell by the trucks of equipment parked outside an old-school colonial-style house. And the lights and equipment set up in the driveway. And the people the lights and equipment are pointed at — a tall, gangly gentleman with long, blond hair, and a shorter, somewhat squatter chap with black hair and a goatee, sporting a heavy green coat and backwards baseball cap.
And, because this is a residential street near New Orleans, and not the sort of place you can shut down indefinitely, eventually a stream of cars has to be let through, drivers rubbernecking as they try to figure out just who the tall gent and his companion are. Because don’t they look just like…? Empire watches several drivers mouth, “Silent Bob?” before one guy winds down his window and bellows, “SNOOTCHIE BOOTCHIES!” The catchphrase made famous by Kevin Smith’s creations, Jay and Silent Bob, across six films — Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back and Clerks 2 — spanning 12 years. And well might that delighted driver bellow it, for here, running through their lines, are Jason Mewes as Jay, and Kevin Smith as Silent Bob, back together again for the first time in over a decade. Snootch to the rebootch, if you will.
It’s a sight Kevin Smith fans had long given up hope of seeing. But here it is. And all because Silent Bob was very nearly permanently silenced.
JUST OVER A year before, Smith posted a picture on his Instagram featuring his now-trademark wide-eyed expression. Except this time, he was in a hospital gown, connected to all kinds of tubes, after suffering a “massive heart attack” in-between two stand-up shows in Los Angeles. He’d felt sick after the first performance, an ambulance had been called, and at a hospital in Glendale he’d been hit with a sobering thought: he could have died. His LAD artery, colloquially known as the Widow Maker, had suffered a 100 per cent blockage. Had he done the second show, instead of having a stent placed in his heart at the hospital, it’s almost certain that he would have. “The mindfuck of it all was how close to death I came without being in any pain,” Smith tells Empire. “When I had an anal fissure years ago, that was agony, dude. I still think about that pain to this day. The heart attack didn’t even come close, but shit, it was real. Real as raincoats. And it made me treat shit more seriously.”
Portly and proud of it, Smith had never been a poster child for healthy living. Yet the fire in his chest lit one under his backside. Several fires, actually. So, the Kevin Smith who is filling out Silent Bob’s coat today isn’t quite filling it out in the way he used to. He’s noticeably thinner. Truth is, he looks great. All part of his sudden, snap decision to turn vegan (which, for a guy who doesn’t really like vegetables, means the Impossible Burger has become his friend) and take up exercising. “I was just afraid of fucking
dying,” says the director, who hasn’t lost his garrulous, sweary nature, or the ability to drop a killer anecdote at a moment’s notice. “Fear of death made me eat green things that I never wanted to eat before, and made me hike three fucking miles up Runyon Canyon every day.
I got a second chance, man.”
That second chance was also a creative one. Smith had been, for some time, trying to figure out a way to reconnect with some of his most beloved characters. A script for ‘Clerks III’ had been written a while ago, and then scrapped when Jeff Anderson, it is believed, didn’t want to reprise his role as acerbic video-store employee, Randal. On reflection, it seems, that may have been a good thing. “If Clerks is me in my twenties and Clerks II was me in my thirties, ‘Clerks III’ was almost middle age to the end,” says Smith. A recent reading of that script, for charity back in New Jersey, laid that bare. “It’s a sad script. It has a mass shooting and I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to send people to the movie theatre going, ‘I love Clerks!’ and all of a sudden it has this bleak ending.”
‘Mallrats 2’, too, fell through, due to rights issues. “Then I was like, ‘Wait! I own Jay and Silent Bob, so we’re going to do Jay & Silent Bob Reboot!’”
Which is why we’re here today, watching the long-awaited return of Jay and Silent Bob, 13 years after they ended Clerks II pretty much how they began Clerks — standing outside the Quick Stop in New Jersey. Reboot, while continuing the threads dangled by that movie (have a wild guess where we find our heroes as the movie begins) is, first and foremost, as the title suggests, a reboot of Smith’s free-wheeling, anarchic, deeply self-referential goof, Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. The whole movie is predicated on the joke of, “We’re doing the same movie again,” laughs Smith. “It’s a remix in so many ways.”
So, today’s scene sees Shannon Elizabeth reprise her role from Strike Back as Justice, the girl who fell — against all the odds — for Mewes’ Jay. And in this scene, as she says an awkward goodbye to them while her new life partner, Reggie (played by Rosario Dawson), looks on, indicates where Smith might be taking this remix. As they hug, even as Jay clings on a little too long and a little too lecherously (Elizabeth’s suggestion following several fairly straight takes), there’s something unexpected in play here. Could it be… poignancy? A sense of actual regret on Jay’s part? Might this be… actual emotion? In a Jay and Silent Bob movie?
“It did turn into the post-heart attack movie,” admits Smith. “It did turn into something a little bit profound, while being fucking ridiculous and stupid. We maintain the joke pretty great, but it has to be about something more. I’m relatively sure after 25 years I know which button to push to make you laugh, but I want you to fucking feel. Honestly, I want you to choke up.”
Yet the surprising thing here is that it’s not a movie about mortality or death, but becoming a father, as Jay finds out that his brief postStrike Back dalliance with Justice resulted in a daughter, Milly. Who is played by Smith’s own daughter, Harley Quinn Smith. “That came off two things,” laughs Smith the elder. “The kid’s generally blonde-ish, and any time I put a picture on Instagram, people are always like, ‘Hey man, is Jay Mewes her fuckin’ father?’ And then, watching Jay be a dad for the last four years [Mewes has a daughter, Logan, with his wife, Reboot producer Jordan Monsanto]. Fuck, man, the guy least likely, the guy we all made fun of, the guy who’s the walking, talking, fucking time bomb, turned out to be hands-down the best father I’ve ever known. Jay being a dad in the movie was everything.” Though given that the scene immediately after the farewell to Justice sees Milly knock both her dad and Silent Bob out would indicate that the relationship has a way to go before it could be seen as cosy.
Smith, who remains as wonderfully candid as ever, knows that the heart attack has impacted on Reboot in several ways. The emotional heft is obvious. But it’s also tangible in the presence of
Elizabeth and Dawson, the latter in particular taking advantage of a day off on Zombieland: Double Tap to fly in for a single afternoon and reunite with her friend and Clerks II director. “It’s been beautiful; it’s been like that a lot,” smiles Smith. “That’s how we got everybody to come out. I’d call somebody and they’d be like, ‘I don’t know, man — New Orleans is four hours away.’ I’m like, ‘Do you realise I almost FUCKING DIED LAST YEAR?’ ‘Alright, I’m coming up.’ It was a very effective casting tool.”
And nowhere was it more effective than in recruiting one of the biggest stars on the planet. But, more importantly, repairing a friendship that Smith thought had long faded away.
MOST PEOPLE WON’T respond when they get a strange text from an unknown number. Especially when that text simply says, “This you?” But when Ben Affleck got that text from Smith earlier this year, not only did he respond, not only did it lead to Reboot’s most important cameo, but it led to the two, who hadn’t spoken in years, reconnecting. “Oh man, that was the real gift of Reboot,” says Smith. “So much so that if it came out and people are like, ‘This is the worst fuckin’ movie you’ve ever made,’ I’d go, ‘Yeah, but y’know… I got my friend back.’”
With the exception of Mewes, and Smith himself, Affleck has been in more Kevin Smith films than anyone. Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back and Jersey Girl would make up the bulk of the box set, with an honourable mention to Affleck’s brief cameo in Clerks II as ‘Gawking Guy’. Since then, though, nothing. And the way Smith tells it, the two — as old friends often do — drifted apart, to the point where, when Smith broke the ice by texting, “This you?”, Affleck responded, “This me. Who this?”
A back-and-forth started, and eventually Smith nervously sent over a pre-planned invite for Affleck to come and play on Reboot, incorporating a King Osric quote from Conan The Barbarian. “It’s one thing to reach out to the dude, but another thing to reach out and instantly ask for a fucking favour, you know?” says Smith. “Finally he writes back, ‘It’s so telling that you still think of yourself as a king.’ And right there and then my heart melted. I said, ‘That’s Ben. That’s the same boy I made my childhood with. That’s the guy I made Chasing Amy with.’”
Smith had been prompted to get in touch with Affleck when an American film journalist called Kevin Mccarthy had interviewed the actor for his new film, Triple Frontier, and asked if he’d been tapped for a Reboot cameo. (At that stage, it seemed, if you hadn’t been, you weren’t worth tapping.) Affleck replied that he hadn’t, but was open to it. And that sent Smith, who by then was deep into production on Reboot, into something of a spiral. “The last few years of my life, I don’t know how Ben Affleck feels about me because I haven’t heard from him,” he says. “And I would hate to reach out and say, ‘Hey, it feels like
we’re not friends anymore and have him be like, ‘You’re fucking right.’”
But, egged on by his producers, Smith cued up his King Osric gambit as a tweet, and then — perhaps wisely — decided to keep it private. And now that Affleck had said yes, now that the lines of communication were open, Smith’s head was spinning. Which is how Affleck, who had agreed to come and do a couple of hours as Cock Knocker, the villain of the ‘Bluntman And Chronic’ reboot that Jay and Silent Bob are trying to shut down, wound up with a vastly expanded role. “The next morning I texted him and said, ‘Doing a couple of lines as Cock Knocker feels like a waste of resources. How’d you like to play Holden again?’ And he said, ‘I would love to do that.’ So I wrote an eight-page sequel to Chasing Amy.”
Which is how Jay & Silent Bob Reboot also functions as a follow-up to Smith’s third and arguably most personal film, with Affleck reprising his role as tortured comic-book writer Holden Mcneil and Joey Lauren Adams reappearing as Alyssa Jones, the lesbian artist he falls in love with but, ultimately, loses out on. And, without going too heavily into spoiler territory, Smith is confident that this unexpected bounty will satisfy fans of that film and also its harshest critics. “It transforms the movie,” he says. “It’s the best scene in the movie, hands down. I made some of the best art I ever made in my life with these people and to come back to the table and do it again, it was fucking beautiful.”
AT ONE POINT during Empire’s two-day set visit, Smith muses out loud that Jay & Silent Bob Reboot might be his last movie. Not because he’d be hanging up the trenchcoat afterwards, but… “I do feel like, oh shit, I’m probably going to die after the movie because it feels like tying up all
these weird loose ends,” he says. “That’s why I’m putting everything into it. I want to make sure I go out making sure I hit every angle.”
Six months on, when we reconnect in early September, Smith is still with us. And allowing himself to look to the future, and further dalliances with his View Askewniverse characters. “If I dropped dead, this would be the one to go out on,” he laughs. “But if I’m still ticking, I’m sure I’ll do something else.”
Buoyed by working again with Jason Lee — acting for the first time in years to return as Mallrats’ Brodie Bruce — and the spike of interest following the original’s unexpected referencing in Captain Marvel, Smith is talking again of ‘Mallrats 2’. And after that, the great white whale of ‘Clerks III’, this time with less mass murder. “There’s a story I’d love to do with Dante and Randal where I get to leave them in the best place possible,” he says. And so what if Jeff Anderson, a reluctant actor at the best of times, doesn’t want to do it? Smith has faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles before, and surmounted them. “If we could get Ben into Reboot,” he says, “we could do anything.”
And all he had to do to make this work was nearly die. “I don’t want to make heart attacks sexy for anybody,” laughs Smith, “but it could really work out.” Remember, folks — don’t try heart attacks at home. Kevin Smith is a professional.
JAY & SILENT BOB REBOOT IS IN CINEMAS FROM 29 NOVEMBER