Trevor Fehrman on the Pussy Troll scene from Clerks II:

Was there ever a scene where you couldn’t keep a straight face delivering your lines?

Yes, the pussy troll scene. [laughs]

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of. What the hell was that?

Clerks IIThe pussy troll scene was one of those scenes that is a real nothing ventured, nothing gained scenario. When I first read the script I thought, “Whew, he didn’t fuck it up.” The second thought was, “How are we going to make this scene work?” There are a couple of golden rules that always exist in comedy. There’s the rule of three – two times isn’t funny, four times isn’t funny, but three times is funny. The second rule is you have to believe it. In order for the audience to find it funny they need to believe that you believe what you’re saying. The dilemma with that scene is how the fuck do you convince the audience that this person actually believes there’s a malevolent troll living in his girlfriend’s vagina? How do you fucking sell that? That’s hard. We rehearsed that hard core for like a week, it was real touch and go. Literally seconds before we did my close up on that scene where I was going to have to really sell the lines, Kevin came up to me and he’s had an epiphany. “Dude, total change of plans. Just think ‘The Shining,’ do it creepy.” I was like, “I don’t know man,” and he just said, “‘The Shining.'” [laughs] We did it in this creepy way and it turned out really well. I have all the lines in that scene, but in a way – and I promise that I’m not trying to be cosmetically humble here – that really is Jeff’s scene. If you watch the film with an audience, listen to where the laughs come from. It’s not when I’m talking, it’s when the camera cuts back to Jeff’s blank stare. [laughs] The audience needs to have a proxy to know it’s not a completely insane world they’re watching, that there’s someone as shocked and appalled by this as they are.

The part where I couldn’t stop laughing to the point where we couldn’t actually use it is the line where I’m like, “Boyfriends and Girlfriends talk to each other about sex stuff, Randall. You’d know that if you ever had a girlfriend.” Kevin originally had me holding up this hamburger and pouring ketchup on it, just staring at it. [laughs] So, I’m delivering the line while staring at the hamburger and for whatever reason it tickled me so much that I could not stop laughing. Kevin just said, “Allright, dude, put the ketchup down.”

1 Comment

  1. Funny stuff .. can’t wait to go see this one later today!

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