No./2 Cinema’s strangest family just got a little bigger
Ivan Reitman tells us how he cast the third star of Twins sequel TRIPLETS: Tracy Morgan
FOR THE PAST decade, there’s been a whole lot of yakety yak about a sequel to Twins. In 2012, it was announced that a follow-up to the 1988 comedy — which became a surprise box-office smash and altered the entire course of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career, turning him into a credible comedic force — was in the works. Original director Ivan Reitman was attached as producer; Eddie Murphy was joining Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito as a third mismatched sibling. But then: nothing. It seemed as if the project would remain Hollywood vapour, destined to never get out of the laboratory.
Until now. “It’s happening,” says a bullish Reitman, speaking exclusively to Empire. Albeit no longer with Murphy, but Tracy Morgan, the comedy star last seen working with Murphy in Coming 2 America. “I think Eddie would have been great too,” Reitman continues. “But Eddie got very busy in the last few months. There are some great comedic actors, but very few who I thought would work in terms of the energy of Arnold and Danny. I think the three of them will be amazing together. I’m hoping to do that next, so we’re just organising it right now — we have a very good script.”
The opening of the original film set up Schwarzenegger’s pure-hearted, abbed-up Julius and Devito’s slippery, ponytailed Vincent as being the results of a secret genetics experiment. It turns out that there was more to that DNA tinkering than we thought, with another long-lost Benedict sibling set to step forward and send the twins into a spin. “We have a very cool idea to explain the fact that there’s another brother, and an African-american brother, within the genetics of the whole story,” explains Reitman. “I think it’s one of the better sequences in the movie. And it’s not doing any harm to the original movie.”
With Triplets set to shoot in Boston next year, Reitman says that he’ll be returning to the director’s chair himself, for the first time since 2014’s Draft Day. And the filmmaker, who has been busy bringing back iconic characters from another of his ’80s classics with Ghostbusters: Afterlife (directed by son Jason), is clearly fired up about the prospect of turning an iconic double-act into a triple-act. Even if Schwarzenegger, Devito and Morgan are yet to actually get together in the same room. “I’ll have them do all that anyway, just to find those aspects of their characters that will translate in the most humorous way,” Reitman says. “But I mean, there was no chemistry read between Devito and Arnold. I just sort of imagined it and I thought it would be good.”
It was. And profitable too, to the tune of $216 million. So, to anyone betting against Triplets, heed the words of Julius Benedict: “You have no respect for logic… And I have no respect for those who have no respect for logic.”