Matt Prokop's
"Furry Vengeance"
by Lynn Barker
 You might know Matt Prokop as "Jimmie the Rocket Zara" in High School Musical: Senior Year. Starting this Friday, you can catch the cutie communing with a ticked off Mother Nature in the Brendan Fraser comedy Furry Vengeance. Matt plays Brendan's teen son who is a real fish out of water when he has to move to the "boonies" from the city. Matt moved to L.A. from Texas to be an actor at age 16 so he knows that "stranger in a strange land" vibe.
The actor called us from his Studio City, Ca. digs (about 5 miles from where we live) to fill us in on hanging out with Brendan, having hot Brooke Shields play his mom in the movie and being stuffed into a "clown car"-sized Smart Car with most of the cast!
Matt assures us he's not currently shooting High School Musical 4 as rumored but did reveal that he got his first screen kiss in "Furry"... with her mom watching! Eeeeeek!
AGW: You came out to Hollywood at age 16 to be in the biz. How scary was that as a teen?
Matt: It's funny, it's kind of like the same thing my character Tyler in Furry Vengeance went through. I came out (from Texas) at the same age that Tyler has to move, not knowing anyone in California and, literally, I spend a good four months in an apartment with my mom and our little dog just taking everything in and doing the tourist things like Hollywood Boulevard and the Kodak Theater tour.
 I was going out for like a hundred commercial auditions then acting classes and meeting people. It was a fresh start; knowing no one. You could be whoever you wanted to be. It was cool once I finally met other people who were doing the same thing I wanted to do.
AGW: Tyler isn't exactly an outdoorsman. Are you? do you hike or camp etc.?
Matt: Totally. Every summer my grandpa and I would go to Garner State Park in Texas. We'd camp out and go tubing down the river, jumping off mountains. My dad was a fishing guide for five years.
AGW: The movie is about a land developer trying to rip down a forest. Do you consider yourself an environmentalist? What do you do at home to be "green"?
Matt: I recycle and try to turn the lights off. Those are my two big things. We always kill all the power before we go out, kill as many lights as we can. Even the little things like unplugging your cellphone charger. A lot of people don't think about that, it's 'oh no. I took my phone off the charger, we're good' but that is still going on. So do that. Luckily my apartment has the recyclables and trash section so it's easy to recycle. They are making it easy for us.
AGW: How was hanging out with some of the critters in the film? I know they shot some of the animal action separately but there were some animals on set...
Matt: I loved the raccoons. They are awesome. They just want to hang out on your arm. They would chill. And the skunks, actually were really fun. I asked if they were (de-smelled) about fifty times. The funny thing is one of our drivers, when he was walking out to his car to drive to set, got sprayed by a wild skunk. It was really funny because, after that, nobody would trust the (movie) skunks. 'No. I don't believe it'. You would hold them and they would try to rub noses with you like a cat would do so they were really cuddly.
AGW: Any animals you weren't too fond of?
Matt: The bear freaked me out. The bear scared me. You can't really trust the big bears. You've got to get the little cuddly ones.
AGW: Talk about any challenges on set. I heard that it was hot and there were "killer bees" and mosquitoes?
 Matt: There were days. It wasn't hot necessarily but really humid. We were filming right in the middle of the woods. We had 200 extras on set. But there was a Smart Car on set, like those little clown cars and, Brendan's a big guy. He's really tall. Brendan, myself, Skyler (Samuels), Brooke Shields, Ken Jeong and Angela Kinsey all pile up into the Smart car. Brendan is in the driver's seat and Ken Jeong is on his lap. Brooke is in the passenger seat and me, Skyler and Angela are all squeezed in the middle and we have the AC on. It was just for the AC.
AGW: Hilarious.. all that body heat probably just cancelled that out! Okay Brooke Shields plays your mom in the film. How was that? She's still pretty hot.
Matt: Brooke is the best. She still has an amazing body. She is the most fit woman. They'd pick her up at 7 A.M. and she'd been up an hour before hitting the gym and working out. She is amazing. I got really lucky with the mom choice for this movie.
AGW: Your first on screen kiss was with Skyler in this movie. Was that just embarrassing?
Matt: It was a little embarrassing because her mom was there off camera. There was the age difference (he's 19, Skyler is 15) and I hadn't kissed a girl in front of her mother so it was a little awkward. But we had an amazing director Roger Kumble who has directed a lot of scenes like that, like in Just Friends and Cruel Intentions, two of my favorite movies, so it came out exactly how everyone envisioned it.
pictures
courtesy of and copyright Summit Pictures, 2010 |
