ojok ngono le: 'Footloose' Star Kenny Wormald Reveals Secrets Behind Exclusive Trailer

'I was blown away,' actor tells MTV News of seeing footage for the first time.
By Eric Ditzian, with reporting by Amy Wilkinson

Julianne Hough and Kenny Wormald in "Footloose"
Photo: Paramount Pictures

"Footloose" star Kenny Wormald sidled up to his computer, hit play on the trailer for his remake of the classic 1984 flick and quickly realized he'd made a big blunder.

"I watched it alone in my house, and that was a mistake, because I thought I was going to scream!" the dancer-turned-actor told MTV News. "I was blown away."

By now, though the 26-year-old has had time to settle down, he's no less pumped about the film, which hits theaters on October 14 and which he calls "all new, but it also pays homage to the original." To celebrate our debut of the trailer, Wormald gave us a call and revealed some secrets behind the new footage.

Backflips and Angry Dances
The most iconic scene in the original flick features a young Kevin Bacon going wild in a warehouse, dancing and flipping like he's trying to win an Olympic gold medal in gymnastics. The new movie, as the trailer hints, re-creates that scene. Wormald himself busted out the great majority of those moves but had to make way for the experts from time to time.

"We called it the angry dance," he explained. "There's some crazy stuff going on in that scene — some gymnastic stuff that is a little bit from the original and they wouldn't let me do some of it. It's just when it comes to the death-defying stunts — flips and stuff — that's not me. They were like, 'I don't think so. Sit down, Kenny!' "

Wormald again had to step away from the cameras when it came to a perilous backflip seen early in the trailer. "All of the dancing is me," he said. "But that flip isn't me — but don't tell anyone!"

The Exploding Bus
Late in the trailer, we get a glimpse of Wormald racing a bus, followed quickly by a gnarly explosion. Turns out, that scene is an action-movie tweak to the original's tractor chicken race.

"They made it really climactic," Wormald said of the original scene. "But if you think about it, tractors only go five miles per hour. So I think [director] Craig Brewer wanted a more badass version of the chicken race."

The Boston Accent
Bacon's character hails from Chicago — a northern boy who moves into a southern town and brings an urge to boogie with him. But from the minute Wormald opens his mouth in the new trailer, we can tell he's not from Chicago. Instead, he speaks with a thick accent, one not originally part of the script but which the Boston-born actor introduced to the project.

"They went into casting thinking it would be the same [as the original]. But when I went in there, I wanted to be different than the other guys. I knew it was a kid from up north going down south, so I made a decision to use my Boston accent in the audition," Wormald told us. "As I kept getting closer and closer to booking it, they never said don't use the accent. And then I booked it and they said, 'We're going to change it from Chicago to Boston.' They dug it."

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