NBC LA entertainment reporter Heather Brooker sits down with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter to talk about their epic new movie, “Bill & Ted Face the Music.” It premieres in select theaters and on VOD Aug. 29.
It’s been 31 years since we first met two exuberant surfer-types named Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted Theodore Logan in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” They returned to the big screen in 1991 for “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” and many thought that would be the last of the series.
No way, dude.
The pair are back in “Bill & Ted Face the Music” to once again save humanity, or reality as it’s explained in this film, through an epic song. It seems Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) have spent the last 30 years getting older, getting married and having kids. They have tried over and over again to write the perfect song but have failed, epically.
An emissary named Kelly (Kristen Schaal) takes Bill & Ted to the future where they learn they’re supposed to perform the greatest song ever in about an hour, or the same length of time as the movie. But, they don’t know what that song is and are stumped until they realize they can hop in their time machine phone booth and steal it from their future selves.
“I don’t think either of us walked away from the second one and thought we’d come back and do a third,” Winter explains. “We just thought it was a great idea. It just seemed like a fun way to return to the characters and imagine how they would have become as adults.”
The script was written by the original “Bill & Ted” writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon who added Bill and Ted’s wives, Joanna (Jayma Mays) and Elizabeth (Erinn Hayes) and their daughters Thea (Samara Weaving) and Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine).
“Brigette and Samara played their own characters,” Reeves explains. “You can see the influence of their fathers in the characters and their mothers, but they were their own people.”
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The unique characters in the “Bill & Ted” universe are what makes this franchise so fun. And as Reeves explains, it’s the friendship we find so epic.
“They’re so ebullient. They’re fun. They’re kind of heroic. You kind of root for Bill and Ted. They’re always given these impossible odds to succeed or figure out what’s going on,” Reeves explains. “It’s fun to see them like, anything is possible”
You can see what’s possible when “Bill & Ted Face the Music” lands in select theaters and on VOD August 28. It stars Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Jayma Mays, Erinn Hayes, Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine and William Sadler and was directed by Dean Parisot.
