Dirty business
The stars of the R-rated ‘Good Boys’ had to leave their swear words at work — and ask their parents to explain the other stuff
‘WE had a motto: What’s said on set stays on set,” Brady Noon, one of the young stars of “Good Boys,” tells The Post.
In the raunchy, hard-Rrated comedy, out today, Brady plays Thor, one of three sixth-graders (Jacob Tremblay and Keith L. Williams play the others) trying to make it to their first “kissing party.” Along the way, they swear like sailors and encounter a raft of situations guaranteed to horrify parents.
The kids weren’t “legally allowed to see the movie alone,” says 13-year-old Brady, so he and his co-stars saw it earlier this week with their families at the Los Angeles premiere.
Brady hoped that seeing it on-screen would clear up some plot points. In the film, the kids assemble “weapons” culled from a parent’s closet that turn out to be sex toys. “I don’t know what half the stuff in there is,” the New Jersey native says. “Some of the things my mom explained to me. Some of the stuff she would say, ‘Let’s save that for another time.’ ” Like, when? “Like, probably when I’m moving out,” he says.
Thor is a bit of a hat tip to Corey Feldman’s character from 1985’s “The Goonies,” colorful Mouth. “We definitely called him ‘the Mouth,’ ” says co-writer Lee Eisenberg, “but we also talked about him being a young Jonah Hill.”
Brady and his co-stars were passingly familiar with most of the profanity in the script, but forbidden from busting any of it out at home. Shooting the movie “was like a free pass to swear, and you couldn’t get in trouble!” he says, gleefully.
Still, says co-writer and director Gene Stupnitsky, “we never heard them swear outside of reading dialogue, ever.”
“The movie was rated R, but the set was not rated R, if that makes sense,” Eisenberg adds. “If the kids asked a question about the dialogue, it would be like, ‘I’m supposed to say the Fword here, how do you want me to say it?’ ”
At one point, Thor ends up in a middleschool production of “Rock of Ages,” playing a hair-metal singer who takes a hard turn into drug use. “They just told me, ‘Put this powdered doughnut up to your nose! It smells so good!’ ” Brady says, laughing. “I don’t even know. Some of that stuff didn’t even seem that funny.”
The filmmakers say they kept explanation to a minimum. “The company line was, ‘Go ask your mother,’ ” says Stupnitsky. “Fairly early on, they just learned we weren’t going to give them any context for anything.”
In one scene, the trio is freaked out by a porn video. “We were trying to get a real reaction out of them,” says the director, “so we mocked up one of those scary videos where you have a waterfall or something and then suddenly a monster face pops out. A real reaction of horror.”
Asked whether kids his age really curse like the characters in the movie, Brady believes that, if they do, it’s mostly bluster. “Some kids in my school try to be cool and curse,” he says. “But they don’t know what they’re saying half the time.”
The filmmakers say the tween demographic definitely isn’t the target market, but that comes with a caveat: “We didn’t make the movie for 12-year-olds,” says Eisenberg, “but I know 12-year-old me would have died to have seen this.”