During a most excellent panel discussion of Bill & Ted Face the Music on Saturday (July 25) at Comic-Con@Home, it came to light that actors Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving, who play the daughters of the title dudes, had never seen the first two movies in the series before.
While Lundy-Paine did not delve too deeply into why they had never checked out the original Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) or Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, the Australian-born Weaving — who broke out last year with American audiences in the horror comedy Ready or Not — chalked this heinous gap in her cinematic knowledge up to when and where she was born.
“I unfortunately was born in 1992, so it was before my time,” she said during the Kevin Smith-moderated talk (see below), which also featured Keanu Reeves (Ted), Alex Winter (Bill), William Sadler (Death), director Dean Parisot plus writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson. “Also, I could be wrong, and I know a few Aussies who’ve seen it, but I think it was quite an American cultural phenomenon.”
Weaving said it was her fiance Jimmy Warden who encouraged her to go after the role. “I remember getting an email about the audition and reading it, and saying, ‘What’s Bill & Ted…?’ My partner was sitting next to me and he leapt off the couch and started doing this bizarre surfer voice I had never heard of. That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, those films really had an impact on the culture of America and surf culture especially.’”
She continued, “Jimmy was like, ‘Dude, you gotta do the audition, bro!’ And I was like, ‘Who have you become?’ Then he immediately said, ‘You have to get this job, let’s watch both (previous films) back to back right now.’ We had so much fun. I just hadn’t seen films like that before. It was so innocent and naïve and delightfully funny. Then I was in Santa Monica, reading opposite Brigette and giving it my best shot.”
Weaving’s Thea Preston and Lundy-Paine’s Billie Logan join their respective dads Ted and Bill, now married, middle-aged and “respectable,” on a new quest through time and space after the two dudes are told by a messenger from the future (Kristen Schaal) that they still must write that one perfect song with which only they can save the universe.
Playing the children of Reeves and Winter’s iconic characters was a challenging proposition at first, says Weaving: “It was really daunting trying to fill Bill and Ted’s shoes, but still trying to make the character different from doing an impression of them.”
Also appearing the film are returning cast members Amy Stoch as Bill’s stepmother Missy and Hal Landon Jr. as Ted’s dad Jonathan, while new recruits include Erinn Hayes, Jayman Mays, Anthony Carrigan, Beck Bennett and Jillian Bell.
After first securing an August 21 release date, then moving that briefly to August 14, Bill & Ted Face the Music is now scheduled to arrive on premium VOD and in theaters where COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted on September 1.