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Compiled by: Jack Foley
Q. Are you into the gym regime? Or does being a wife,
mother and actress mean that you have enough on your plate?
A. [Laughs] I work the gym regime like you would not
believe. No, honest to God, the only reason I would joke is because
Ben got very in shape for the film, and it was the first film
that I had done after having our daughter. She was about a year
and a half.
Dodgeball, the game, lasts, what, five minutes, for real, when
you play it for real. Obviously, in the film they extended, and
used slow-motion, but it’s not that long a game, because
there’s only six players on either side, and usually people
are really pretty aggressively attacking you from the opposite
end of the court. It’s so exhausting, because you’re
not doing one motion - you’re bending, you’re picking
up, you’re throwing’ you’re taking hits, and
I kept saying, ‘guys, guys, take it easy on me, I just had
a baby’.
And finally, it might have been Justin Long, or one of the other
actors in the film, said, ‘yeah, isn’t she a year
and a half?’ And I literally had not had much exercise.
I thought it was going to be so much easier, because I remembered
playing Dodgeball when I was 10, and we have a lot more energy.
I’m not a huge gym buff, so to speak.
Q. Is there any element of White Goodman’s character
that Ben shares?
A. [Laughs], Um, I keep saying, if someone can find me
a White Goodman-type character walking this earth, I’d love
to encounter him, face-to-face, because I can’t believe
that anyone on this earth exists on that level.
BEN: Are you saying it’s not a realistic
character?
A. What I’m saying is that I don’t
know that someone could actually hit on a woman, and maybe I’m
just the person that’s never been hit on in that sort of
way, and actually insult her and think he’s doing the right
thing.
You know what? No, no. Obviously, in the physical transformation,
the Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse, which the look was sort of modelled
after. I laughed, because I thought that White Goodman probably
thought that was still cool, you know. He was in sort of his own
time warp. He was just so out of touch and delusional that, no,
I did not see any real, true aspects of Ben there.
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Q. With the scene you described,
was it easy to keep a straight face? Were there many takes?
A. I feel like I came off as the most unprofessional
actress.. and I don’t think he [Ben] helped matters, to
be honest with you. I think he went out of his way to make me
laugh even more. I couldn’t keep a straight face. I think
that the moment you see on film, out of maybe 20 takes, is the
one moment that…
BEN: You weren’t laughing all the time,
maybe just a little bit…
CHRISTINE: Are you joking?
BEN: I remember you were also really tired, because
of our daughter, doing double duty, and at one point I think I
put you to sleep.
CHRISTINE: Not true! I think there was a body
language; I knew it was Ben, obviously, but it was just such a
transformation to such a crazy guy, that it made me laugh all
the time. Also, the way the moustache was always crooked, always
made me laugh too, and made me feel that maybe White Goodman didn’t
even have a real moustache…
BEN: Yeah, we did have one idea of maybe seeing
White Goodman get so mad at the end that he just ripped off moustache,
but we thought it would break the reality too much - whatever
reality was there.
Q. Your characters seem to learn big life-lessons. Did
you learn any on-set, or is there anything you can impart that
you really think we should know?
A. To know when to duck. I just came to the very quick
realisation that guys in their 20s and 30s, if you put a red rubber
ball in their hands, they become 12 again, and it doesn’t
matter whether you’re a girl, or a guy, or whoever, including
Ben.
BEN: Yeah, I accidentally nailed her in the face…
CHRISTINE: Accidentally?
BEN: Yeah, it was a training exercise, right?
CHRISTINE: Some call it a training exercise,
others call it taking a ball and winding up as hard as you can,
and then throwing it across the court. I’m talking about
the second one, where I gave you the out… You know what,
the hardest thing about Dodgeball, to grip the ball, you have
to have a big enough hand, and I do admittedly have a girlie throw,
it’s not great, so it was about the dodging and the ducking.
BEN: It also became sort of an ego thing, to
not miss, because there were a lot of extras there watching.
CHRISTINE: It was fun, though, but I think at
the end of the day, we were very happy to be finished with the
shooting of the actual Dodgeball. We honestly had a masseuse,
because we were so badly beaten up and out of shape…
VINCE: We don’t want to give people the
wrong idea that there were never any happy endings… people
were sore and they had to continue playing the game, so they were
rubbed down in a very professional way, just so they could get
back out on the Dodgeball court.
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