Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who played Fogell (a.k.a. McLovin) in 2007’s Superbad, has come clean about a rather awkward aspect of filming the iconic comedy movie. Spoilers ahead, obviously.
Close to the end of the film, the hapless, underage McLovin finds himself in bed with a girl his age – only to be interrupted by his policeman friends Officer Slater (Bill Hader) and Officer Michaels (Seth Rogen).
Here’s the kicker: Mintz-Plasse, like his character, was 17 at the time of filming Superbad, which means he had to have his mum on-set whilst he filmed the sex scene. Fake sex or not, that’s an incredibly awkward situation.
“Yeah, it’s definitely uncomfortable… At the time, I was actually a virgin, so I had no idea what I was doing,” Mintz-Plasse revealed during a recent episode of The Rich Eisen Show.
“I was very nervous, very scared, and then I look over to Video Village [the nickname given to the area where all of the camera shots are fed into video monitors on set] and my mum is eating a handful of popcorn talking to the producers. She was having the time of her life!”
Christopher Mintz-Plasse
Mintz-Plasse isn’t the only one who had to have his mum on-set: Michael Cera, who played the main character Evan, and Emma Stone, who played Jules, were both also under-age during the filming of Superbad, and so both their parents had to be around for some elements of filming, they shared as part of a Vanity Fair retrospective.
That’s not the only parental input Superbad’s production had, either. Seth Rogen, who also wrote the screenplay for the film, shares that his mum came up with one of the best and darkest jokes in the film:
“McLovin is using a fake ID the whole movie, so the cops think he’s like 23. And then at the end of the movie, he finally has sex with a girl who’s actually his age, but the cops catch him and think he’s having sex with an underage girl and arrest him for statutory rape. My mum came up with that joke,” Rogen told The Howard Stern Show a few years ago.
“She read a very early draft of the script and she’s like, ‘it’s funny if the cops arrest him for statutory rape cause they think he’s too old’. And I was like, ‘that’s a solid joke, mum’.”
Seth Rogen
So much for a family-friendly comedy…
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