Interview: Nick Frost, Star of Cuban Fury

British comic actor Nick Frost knows that he’s best known (especially in the States) for the “Three Flavours Cornetto” film genre-spoof trilogy he helped create and co-starred in with Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright: 2004′s Shaun of the Dead (zombies), 2007′s Hot Fuzz (cops), and last year’s The World’s End (aliens).

But that’s only driven Frost harder to move outside his cinematic comfort zone–so hard, in fact, that one drunken night a few years ago he emailed his long-time producing partner Nira Park with a simple, Full-Monty-esque comic idea: The rather large Frost… dancing.

The result is Cuban Fury, a sweetly charming British rom-com about Bruce (Frost), a sad sack engineer who, as a teen, had turned his heeled shoes away from a promising salsa-dancing career. Now in his 30s, having long since put away the sequined-shirts and put on a few pounds, Bruce finds himself crushing on his new boss, Julia (Rashida Jones), and competing for here with a boorish co-worker (Frost’s Pirate Radio co-star Chris O’Dowd).

Naturally, Bruce does what anyone in a romantic comedy would do in this situation: He sets out to win Julia’s heart by reigniting his passion for salsa dancing.

In addition to the always stellar O’Dowd and Jones, Cuban Fury (the feature-film debut of both writer Jon Brown and director James Griffiths), also sports strong supporting comedic work from Ian McShane (as Bruce’s surly one-time dance teacher), Olivia Colman (as his sister and one-time dance partner), and especially Kayvan Novak (as an over-enthusiastic classmate).

I and several other writers sat down with Frost in Chicago last week to talk about producing and starring in Cuban Fury, “dance lesson prison,” embarrassing nuptial customs, and life with Pegg and Wright post-Cornetto.

Cuban Fury opens everywhere this Friday.

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What dance films did you look to when making this?

Nick Frost: Grease was the first film I saw in the cinema—my parents took me when I was five. I kinda love that film. But for this, I didn’t look much further than Strictly Ballroom. That was the touchstone. In that film you believed in the characters; it’s kinda tragic, it’s funny, and the dance is beautiful, and none of those elements compromised the other – they all worked together. This film is slightly broader than that, but that was what we wanted to achieve, and to do so with dance that is beautiful, passionate, and real, but with believable people.

Your Cornetto Trilogy movies are usually very physical action films, with lots of stunts. How did training for this film compare?

Frost: It was seven hours a day, every day, for seven months to be a dancer. I had to get up at 6 am every day, lift weights for an hour, then dance for six more hours. It was an absolute nightmare. It was like being in prison for seven months.

Immediately on Day One, I thought, “You fucking idiot.” You realize that as a producer you stood up in meetings and said you were gonna do all the dancing, and you can’t go back on that now. But it never got easier, there was never a point where you just “got it,” where they pulled the wires out of you head like Neo in The Matrix. As soon as you got good, they just dumped more stuff on top of you.

We shot all the dances wide, even though they don’t always show up like that on screen. So I did all the dances from top to bottom. That is me. Whatever this film does at the box office, I’ll always have this: it’s something I’m really proud of, considering I was terrified of dancing in front of people.

I didn’t like dancing all that much—it was such a move away from what I was comfortable doing. Which is what I wanted to do, to be uncomfortable. Those other roles in Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and World’s End are easy because they’re me. But this guy isn’t me.

Did you always know it had to be salsa dancing in the film?

Frost: I think it had to be a couples dance and something that was so not part of my culture. We Brits don’t dance like that. We watch women dance, then we drink 10 pints of Stella Artois, then we dance a bit, then we fall over.

I did like dancing, but I had an issue about being watched. Being a big man who can dance well makes you an oddity in some circles. It’s the same look you’d get if you were a child who overcame a terrible disease to go on and complete a half marathon. I call “bullshit” on that look—I hated it, so I didn’t like to dance in public.

I didn’t want to dance with my wife on our wedding in front of our families. It lasted about five seconds then I started kicking a potato chip across the floor and finding a piece of fluff in my jacket. Why do we have to dance at weddings? I think it’s a way of proving to your relatives that you have symbolically consummated the marriage.

Because they can’t come up to the hotel room later.

Frost: I would have preferred that! I’d have rather had my Auntie Shelia watch me make love to my wife than have to dance in public.

Honeymoon suites could have two way mirrors, like integration rooms.

Frost: Or a small set of bleachers.

But I secretly always wanted to do a dance film. I’m a fan of them; of nice, un-cynical dance films—what’s not to like? The challenge for me as an actor was to also do something absolutely different from what I do with Simon and Edgar. I hated the dance film idea at first, but it kept popping back into my mind, saying, “You need to tell somebody about this.”

Finally after about three years of that, I came back from a party, wrote the whole idea out, and emailed it to Nira. Woke up the next morning to a reply from her saying, “Let’s have a meeting about this.” And from that email to the first day of production was 15 months. I felt like a serial killer who wanted to get caught.

There was a vague idea at the beginning that I’d dance throughout the whole thing; that I’d never not be dancing in the film. One 94-minute take. [Laughs] But we couldn’t make a story work where I’d dance through it all. It’d be like Christopher Walken in Spike Jonze “Weapons of Choice” video.

There’s that terrifically hilarious scene in the middle where you and Chris O’Dowd have a “dance fight” in a parking ramp. How do you balance the broader, more absurd physical comedy of that scene with the more gentle tone of the rest of the film?

Frost: It is hyper-real, but I think we earned it by that point. If you’re going to have a dance fight it should be long enough and be funny. I think we’re allowed to do a few flips—which are the only things I didn’t do. We wanted to make that fight scene like The Bourne Identity.

Now that The World’s End has wrapped up the Cornetto Trilogy, what’s next for you guys?

Frost: We were all pleased and proud that we did those films by sticking to our guns, we didn’t try to second guess what we thought an audience would want, which dilutes what made it good in the first place. We’re really lucky and that isn’t lost on us.

But me and Simon and Ed make a film together every four or five years, then we take four or five years off to do our own bits and pieces. That feels like kind of a nice way to do it, really. We’ve never been people who kowtowed to the expectations of fans in terms of pumping something out every 18 months because that’s what we think people will like.

If it means it takes four years for us to find a good idea and great story, then that’s what we’ll do. That enables us to do these other projects. I personally like this template of coming up with ideas and finding great young writers and directors to do them while I star or produce. That feels like a nice way for me.