Jamie Kennedy gets Extreme
Jamie Kennedy seems to thrive on unscripted moments, as we’ve seen from his stand-up act (in which he’s only too happy to joust with audience loudmouths) and guerrilla improv show The Jamie Kennedy Experiment. An extension of this is his recent documentary, Heckler, which examines heckling from a comic’s perspective — a subject Kennedy gets quite animated about. His latest film, Extreme Movie, a Kentucky Fried Movie–meets–American Pie comedy with Michael Cera and Frankie Muniz, hits select theaters and DVD on December 5 (Boston audiences will have to make do with Netflix on this one).
Q: Tell me more about Extreme Movie.
A: It’s all different sketches — what teenagers deal with, what they go through during sex. It’s like those other movies, but this is like the sexual version — the extreme version, if you will.
Q: In Heckler, you compare hecklers to nasty bloggers. Are they different?
A: The heckler is braver because they’re live. They’re usually more drunk and messed up. Or they think they’re helping you. But a blogger ... you know, the Internet is what gave us one of the coolest elections ever in the history of presidents [recently], and the Internet is also the cause of some of the nastiest sex you’ll ever see and some of the most painful things people will ever write, because it’s all anonymous.
Q: How did you create your character [psychologist professor Eli James] for Ghost Whisperer?
A: They just wanted to let me be me. I didn’t really do that much preparation, you know. Had to say a lot of big words; had to go to the dictionary a lot.
Q: And you’re still doing a lot of stand-up stuff, right? That must be a nice outlet for you.
A: Oh, yeah. It’s like I’m funny on the weekends, and during the week, I’m more serious.
