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Actors Speak Out About Their Incredibly “Tough Time” Filming ‘Blue Crush’

It's not all plain sailing

Can you believe it’s been 15 years since Blue Crush entered our lives?! Neither can we. But amidst the news NBC is rebooting the film as a TV series, it’s surfaced that the filming and behind the scenes weren’t quite as dreamy as you might think.

We know him as Anne-Marie’s (Kate Bosworth) love interest, and also as the Harvard law student boyfriend of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, but in a recent interview with Pedestrian TV, actor Matthew Davis admitted that the filming for Blue Crush really took its toll on the cast.

Hard to believe, right? But if you think of the year 2002, and if you note the filming start date as September 12, you can remember the tragedy that hit the US just the day before. “It was just a tough time. We started shooting right after 9/11, the people were really shaken up,” Davis said. So much so that Davis had to take some time away from work straight after filming was completed.

He also confessed that “It was more difficult to film than the script led on”. 

Despite the idyllic location and the thought of spending days on a Hawaiian beach, Davis “took some time off after that movie. It was a pretty traumatic experience on a lot of levels for a lot of people. I just took some time off, collected my thoughts and had a regroup. Things were never really quite the same for me after that film.”

Michelle Rodriguez also admitted the timing took its toll on her too. “I had the 9/11 thing going on with smoke from buildings coming over into my house, I need to get out of here [New York] dude so I was like, Hawaii, whatever, let’s go! Let’s do it now!” she told IGN.

Blue Crush
(Credit: Getty)

The cast on the whole were pretty young, and Kate Bosworth was a recent high school graduate and had only moved to LA two months before landing her lead role. She told Cosmopolitan: “It was so insane. I had just graduated from high school. I moved out to L.A. by myself and got Blue Crush two months later. I am naturally pretty small and, when I got the role, the producer was like, “I don’t know if you can play a surfer believably. You’re going to have to put on some muscle.” I was like, “Okay, anything you want!”

And the fitness routine sounded gruelling: “I was weight training and learning to surf seven hours a day, seven days a week, for four months. I gained 15 pounds of muscle, which is a lot for me. It was a completely different body shape…like putting on a costume to get into character,” she added. 

But despite the hard work emotionally and physically, it’s unapparent in the watching of the film, and still is and always will be our noughties crush.

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