Q&A With Kick Ass Star Christopher Mintz-Plasse
Kick Ass opens in theaters across America on Friday, and this month’s issue of Death + Taxes features Christopher Mintz-Plasse and his co-star Clark Duke in an exclusive cover story and interview. Make the jump for the story by D+T Managing Editor Isaac Lekach, and for some quick verbal punches between the superstars who would be superheroes. (Photos by Ray Lego.)
Christopher Mintz-Plasse is famous. Super duper famous, and made so by a stint at the end of a poorly laminated Hawaiian rainbow and the utterance of one iconic epithet: “I am McLovin.”
His hyphenated surname is not as recognizable as his face: wrinkle-free and cherubic but nebbishy like a spry Woody Allen or a white man’s Urkel. But the point is—you know his face. Ever since his scene-stealing cinematic debut in Superbad, you’ve probably even quoted him. Or at the very least, found yourself choking on your own saliva from a furious fit of laughter brought on by his nervous and jittery delivery. Yes, Christopher Mintz-Plasse is famous. And he’s famous because he’s very, very funny.
The only other actor who has experienced such a fortuitous and monumental overnight surge of success is Jason Schwartzman for his performance as the petulant though loveable Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. But even Schwartzman’s prosperous trajectory, though deserved, was more or less bashert. He is Hollywood royalty after all (Schwartzman is Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew and actress Talia “Adriaaaaan” Shire is his mom). Mintz-Plasse, however, went from complete unknown, with zero ties to Tinseltown, to quintessential beloved underdog.
On a whim, he auditioned for the part of law-breaking, adolescent horn dog “Fogell” in Superbad and nailed it. Since his breakout role, he’s governed his career wisely appearing in a select few films. He popped up briefly in Harold Ramis’s biblical romp Year One and co-starred in David Wain’s sleeper hit Role Models. Now he’s wearing a neoprene suit and doling out an ass kicking in Matthew Vaughn’s comic-based Kick-Ass.
Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Clark Duke, his partner in nerd-dom in the new big-screen comic book adaptation Kick-Ass, are card-carrying members in the elite network of talent to come up through the gold-spinning web of Judd Apatow. The two met on the set of Superbad when Duke, also a close friend of Michael Cera and co-creator of their web series Clark & Michael, told Mintz-Plasse he’d auditioned and been passed over for the role of Fogell. They’ve been fast friends ever since.
But like the virile seed shot forth from so many dick jokes in the Apatow mechanism, Duke and Mintz-Plasse have reached fertile new ground in their burgeoning careers. Duke has gone to star in the teen television series Greek, the raunchy film The Sex Drive, and the forthcoming Hot Tub Time Machine with John Cusack.
