Kevin Smith’s Daughter Turned Down Role in His New Movie: ‘I’ve Got Enough Nepo Baby Shit to Deal With Online’
Kevin Smith had an idea for intriguing stunt-casting in his new film, The 4:30 Movie — he’d hire his daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, to play the Kevin-Smith-as-a-teenager character Brian David. Smith’s wife Jennifer signed off on the idea: “Harley is just a beardless, dickless version of you.” But despite the chance to play the film’s lead, Smith’s offspring turned him down flat.
“She was just like, ‘You don’t think I’ve got enough nepo baby shit to deal with online? You now want me to play you? Fuck that,’” Smith told Hollywood Reporter.
But nepo dads still gotta nepo dad. With Harley out of the picture, Smith turned to her long-term boyfriend, Austin Zajur, that veteran actor from Clerks III and Smith’s TBS reality show, Celebrity Show-Off. “Honestly, he was more Kevin Smith than Kevin Smith,” said Kevin Smith. “He was the perfect, perfect choice.”
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Pretty sure Harley Quinn Smith still got online nepo baby shit over this one.
But probably a good idea to stay out of The 4:30 Movie. Because it’s a loosely autobiographical film about young Smith falling in love with movie-making, some have compared it to The Fabelmans. “And then The New York Times was like, ‘Yeah, it’s kind of like The Fabelmans if the kid grows up to make terrible movies,’” Smith laughed.
At least it’s not another sequel. The affable Smith can’t seem to stop rebooting or creating follow-ups to his original films. There’s the three Clerks movies, a bunch of Jay and Silent Bob adventures, and now he’s trying to get another Mallrats off the ground. That job got harder when original star Shannen Doherty passed away earlier this year.
But Smith thinks he has the perfect replacement for Doherty. “Shannen’s closest friend was Sarah Michelle Gellar, and I worked with Sarah on Masters of the Universe: Revelation,” he says. “So her being Shannen’s bestie and having already tried out for Mallrats 30 years ago next year, I would ask Sarah to step in for Shannen if there’s a possibility that we get to make Twilight of the Mallrats.”
The Hollywood Reporter story didn’t take long to get back to Gellar — hours after it was published, she hopped into the comments section to throw her hat in the ring. “Here for this idea!!”
Smith is clearly here for it as well. Gellar would “bring Shannen’s warmth with her, and it’s maybe the next best thing to having Shannen there,” he said.
Why not? Anything to keep Smith from replacing Doherty with Harley Quinn Smith.
