Jonah Hill Feeling Accepted Despite Girly Scream
This entry was posted on 7/30/2006 2:44 PM and is filed under Interviews.
He’s
not yet a household name, but
Jonah Hill is getting plenty of small
screen face time in the weeks leading up to the release of
the new teen comedy Accepted, courtesy chiefly of two clips — one in which, clad in a foam hot dog
costume, he exhorts passersby to
ask him about his wiener, and another
in which he lets loose with an ear-piercing, high-pitched scream. Funny
thing is,
that scream isn’t really his.
Accepted centers on an enterprising high school senior, Bartleby (Dodgeball's Justin Long),
who, after getting rejected by every college he applies to, creates a
fake university to serve as a post-graduation refuge for he and some
friends. Hill plays Bartleby’s best friend, Sherman, who actually gets
into a nearby school but helps his lifelong pal by designing said
fictitious school’s Web site, among other things.
The set-up for the in-heavy-rotation scream occurs when Bartleby and
his friends scout a condemned mental asylum to serve as the physical
location for their mock university, and a skeleton falls from a ceiling
panel, frightening Sherman. In an instinctual stroke of improvisatory
brilliance, Hill conspired with costar Maria Thayer.
“When it came time for my close-up,” relates Hill, “I said to Maria,
‘Don’t tell anybody, but you scream and I’ll just mime it. But don’t
say anything to anyone else, because it’ll be way funnier that way, if
they’re not expecting it.’ So we did it and everyone around us kind of
lost it. I totally didn’t expect them to put it in the movie, but they
haven’t changed it. And it gets a huge laugh. That’s one of my most
proud moments, because if you write or [come up with something on a
movie like this] and it goes in, you feel like you really contributed
toward making it a little funnier.”
Also co-starring
comedian Lewis Black and
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants'
Blake Lively,
Accepted now opens in theaters nationwide on August 18, after pushing a week.
For more information, visit the movie’s Web site.
