SIXTY SECONDS
THE BILL & TED STAR, 55, ON WHY WE’VE WAITED 30 YEARS FOR A SEQUEL, THE TRAGEDY BEHIND THE LOST BOYS AND HANGING WITH HIS BFF, KEANU REEVES
Friday, September 18, 2020
It’s 30 years since you made Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and you look exactly the same! How?
Gosh, I don’t know. I certainly don’t feel that way! But I will take the compliment. Bill is really fun to play. He’s a really buoyant, youthful person. So finding out who he was at this point in his life was a very joyful experience.
How come Bill & Ted 3 took so long?
These movies have always been challenging to get off the ground. They’re kind of outsider, independent movies not squarely within the mainstream of the industry. The two writers, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, started work on the script a little over ten years ago. It was a pretty great idea. We loved it. We took it into the market and the market said – ‘this is cool, but no thank you’. The financiers were kind of terrified at the idea of seeing middle-aged Bill and Ted. So we went, hat in hand, looking for someone interested in making the film. We didn’t even know it would happen until a few months before. I remember Keanu coming around to dinner the summer before we shot it and saying, ‘We’re never going to make this movie, you realise that?’ and I said, ‘I know we’re not.’
Surely you said, ‘Dude – that’s totally bogus!’?
We don’t actually talk like that you know! Ha ha. Thankfully, along the way the Bill & Ted fanbase caught wind of what we were doing and they became extremely vocal about their desire for this film. Ultimately, that’s what got it made.
Why do we still love Bill and Ted 30 years on?
We can speculate as much as we like, but you never know what makes something take root in a culture. I think what makes it special is that Bill and Ted were always these very genuinely innocent characters. They were not cynical, they were not meta, worldweary or self-reflective. They were very innocent and yet they spoke with this extremely sophisticated, ornate language and the disparity of that is where the comedy is. It’s really fun dialogue to recite. Keanu and I both come from a theatre background and we both like language a lot. The other thing that makes the films infectious is that they were written by two really close friends and performed by two really close friends. So there is a sincere quality to the representation of close friendship in these stories.
I have very personal feelings about what can happen to young people in entertainment
So are you and Keanu actual besties?
Yeah. Keanu’s been one of my very closest friends for the greater part of my life. We see a lot of each other. He’s been around my kids since they were born and we’ve been through ups and downs together and that was one of the things that made us interested in doing a third movie.
Does Keanu ever smile in real life?
Oh yeah. He’s not a gun-toting maniac [like John Wick] in real life.
Is it sad to look back at The Lost Boys now, given the tragic loss of Corey Haim?
Since Corey passed [of pneumonia in 2010 after battling drug addiction] we’ve also lost Brooke McCarter and many other actors. We just lost the director Joel Schumacher, last year. It’s life. I had a really great mini-reunion with the guys last year, which was incredibly sweet, with Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland and Jamison Newlander and Chance Michael Corbitt and a bunch of others. What happened to Corey is just unbelievably tragic. I make documentaries now [on subjects such as the dark web and the Panama
Papers] and my new film, Showbiz Kids, is on children and showbusiness. By the time
I did The Lost Boys in the 1980s, I’d been acting for ten years professionally and had been through a lot of stuff.
I had tried to be the best support I could to the Coreys [Haim and Feldman] on that shoot because they were obviously going through a lot off camera, so
I have very personal feelings about what happened and what can happen in general to young people in the industry.
Would you let your kids go on the stage?
Thankfully, I haven’t had to say ‘no’ yet. They’re into the arts – my middle one is a musician and my eldest is a painter – he’s at art college right now. My youngest is an 11-year-old kid who’s just into doing what
11-year-old kids do. But none have been adamant about entering the entertainment industry, whereas I really plagued my parents. I came up really young as a song and dance kid in theatre. I stopped performing, intentionally, at a certain age. But I’m looking forward to doing acting again now.
Actor Corey Haim
Do you still eat the Bill & Ted breakfast cereal?
No! But what I do have right now is a Bill & Ted ‘Be Excellent!’ face mask, which is fantastic. That’s a sign of the times for you.
Bill & Ted Face The Music is out in cinemas now