‘Bill & Ted’ Star Alex Winter: New Sequel Will Be ‘Really F—ing Funny’
Not only is the third Bill & Ted film still in the works, but actor-director Alex Winter – who co-starred in the original franchise as his excellency Bill S. Preston Esq. – says the comedy sequel is shaping up to be “really sweet and really fucking funny.” Winter talks at length about the long-rumored project with Yahoo Movies UK, noting that the film will focus on their iconic characters “all grown up, or not grown up.”
“But it’s a Bill & Ted movie, that’s what it is,” Winter continues. “It’s for the fans of Bill & Ted. It fits very neatly in the [series]. It’s not going to feel like a reboot. The conceit is really funny: What if you’re middle-aged, haven’t really grown up and you’re supposed to have saved the world and maybe, just maybe, you kinda haven’t?”
The last installment in the franchise was 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, but reports of a follow-up have been circulating over the past few years. The prospect looked grim as of last September, when Keanu “Ted” Reeves told MTV that a work-in-progress script – penned by original co-writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon – was being delayed by an unspecified “darkness,” but Winter sounds optimistic about the future of another bodacious adventure.
“There’s many versions of ourselves in this movie,” he says. “[It’s] answering the question: ‘What happened to these guys?’ They’re supposed to have done all this stuff, they weren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree, what happened 20 years later? To answer that question in a comedic way felt rich with possibility.”
Winter, Reeves, Matheson and Solomon took their time crafting the film’s central premise, but they arrived at a satisfactory story “about four years ago.” The problem, Winter says, is that news of the project hit the media and now fans have to “get dragged through this long, boring, protracted process” of the movie’s development, which “just takes a long time.”
“It took time to construct the idea,” Winter says. “It took Chris and Ed time to build the first draft. Then we put a producer together and got a director [Galaxy Quest’s Dean Parisot]. We’ve been working on drafts for the last couple of years. The script’s been finished for a while, but comedy is so specific. We’re in that world where producers are on, financiers are on and we’re just working and reworking the script.”