Kick-Ass: The Red Mist Interview, In Which An Evil McLovin Salivates Over Kick-Ass 2

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From the very beginning, Kick-Ass has thrown me for a loop. There was that original red band trailer, with the potty-mouthed little girl and some wicked gunplay. All that led me to bask in the genius that is Mark Millar – who Lev interviewed a couple weeks back. Then we finally saw the film, and I pretty much fell in love.

Well last week some of the stars came to town, and there was no way I was missing out. Conversation number one was with McLovin, er, Red Mist – or rather Christopher Mintz-Plasse. I walked into a huge conference room, located deep in the bowels of a midtown Manhattan hotel, to find Mintz-Plasse all but bouncing off the walls. The majority of the room was empty, except for his table in the corner, and I had a strong feeling that he had probably been doing somersaults or cartwheels in there, to rejuvenate between interviews.

Man, there’s a lot of space here – kind of makes you want to do backflips or something.

Yeah, this room is massive. I’ve been running and dancing between each take.

Congrats on the movie; I think this thing is going to be huge. It’s the kind of movie you want to see opening night, with a packed crowd. I think people are going to just lose it.

Oh yeah, this is a crowd movie for sure. You have to see with a couple hundred people. I’ve seen it three times – the first time at Butt-Numb-A-Thon, the Ain’t It Cool festival and that was the best screening ever. There were periods of time when people were clapping in beat with the movie, and then a standing ovation. And then opening South by Southwest was a blast, and then the London premiere was funny because Londoners are more relaxed, and they were more like: ‘mmm, yes, Hit-Girl, yes. Golf claps.

There’s so much going on with your character too – he wants to make daddy proud, but that means doing some pretty awful things. Was there one moment as Red Mist that you felt like you really scored? One moment where you really nailed it?

Oh yeah, there were three moments in the movie that I really love. The first is that moment where I jump off the dumpster and injure my ankle – I think you can see that in the trailers…

Did you improvise that, by the way?

We did a bunch of takes where I either fell or landed perfectly but then I thought: I gotta hurt my ankle. And so I just riffed off that idea and did a couple different takes, and that’s the one that worked. (More at Techland: Whedon To Direct The Avengers)

I also really loved the scene where me and Kick-Ass go to the warehouse, and up until this point the audience has been kind of like: Okay, Red Mist is bad, but it seems like he’s befriending Kick-Ass and he’s an okay guy. But then in that moment, Red Mist just goes totally bad, and he proves what he has.

What’s the third moment then?

Probably that scene in the Mist-Mobile, with Aaron where we’re smoking a joint and just chatting like buddies. I really enjoyed filming that.

And that’s a pretty hard sell, because you two start grooving out to the music, and things like this can work great but they can also backfire and just be embarrassing…

So did we embarrass ourselves? I love it because it is really short and leaves you wanting to know more. And what was great about that was that we actually grooved out for like 10-15 minutes. So I’m hoping that on the DVD there’s a segment of us just dancing, some 15-minute clip of us doing our thing.

Was that in the script, this silly little dance sequence?

No, that was Matthew Vaughn’s idea. He threw on some tunes and we just started dancing…

How did you pick the songs?

He threw on Gnarls Barkley first, which was awesome and made it into the movie, and then there were two to three other songs. And we decided that it would be awesome if at first I was really uncomfortable with this guy in my car, since we really didn’t know each other. But then we’d kind of get lost in the moment and start to really have fun.

I’m wondering how the cast here compares to others you’ve worked with. You have people like Nicolas Cage here, just going so willingly against type…

Oh, this is just one of his best roles, and I’m so happy for him, man. He’s back into the groove, when you look at this and Bad Lieutenant…

Oh yeah, Roger Ebert said that was one of the best films of the decade.

I loved it; it was one of my favorites from last year.

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