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The GW Hatchet

AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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Officials name senior vice president, chief of staff
By Fiona Riley, Assistant News Editor • March 26, 2024

Yippie ki-yay!

Ever wanted to see Chandler and John McClane in bed together? Well, yippie-ki-yay, motherf***ers; here’s your chance.

In the Warner Brothers film “The Whole Ten Yards,” Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry reprise their roles from the original “Whole Nine Yards.” Willis’ hitman Jimmy the Tulip has retired to a life of domesticity with restless wife Amanda Peet, but Perry’s Oz has gotten himself entangled with a Hungarian mob that kidnaps his wife (Natasha Henstridge). Jimmy and Oz must team up once again to save the day.

The Hatchet had a brief opportunity to speak with Willis and Perry via telephone about the weather, growing old and going the whole 10 yards.

Bruce Willis: We’re up here in the 27th floor of the St. Regis, overlooking beautiful downtown Los Angeles. It’s a beautiful day, it’s about 74 degrees, 29 on the downside of 11, and we’re looking at a great day out there today.

Hatchet: Bruce, Matthew, nice talking to you. Can’t help but mention it’s a beautiful day here, too. We’ve been having some pretty gorgeous weather on the East Coast.

BW: Where are you at, Jason?

H: Washington, D.C.

BW: Our nation’s capital.

H: Yes indeed, and I’m only five blocks away from the boss of the free world and all that.

BW: Wow. My pal.

MP: I enjoy your monument.

H: Oh, yes, the national phallus.

MP: Nice.

BW: What’s your question, Jason?

H: I have a question for each of you, actually. Bruce, can you talk to me at all about “Die Hard IV”? Will this be the final appearance of the John McClane character, or-

BW: You know what? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the final appearance, as old as I’m getting. I mean, I don’t know what – I may do “Die Hard in a Wheelchair;” they’re talking about “Die Hard in a Delicatessen,” where I gain, like, 300 pounds, and I talk in a voice like this, and I say, “I’m Bruce Willis. Do you remember me?”

MP: Doesn’t that make you want to go see the film?

H: Absolutely.

BW: It does make you want to go see “Die Hard IV.”

H: I want to see chapter after chapter of this franchise now.

BW: They’re working on the script, and if the script is exciting and kind of lives up to the pedigree of the film, I’ll do it.

H: Are you looking forward to working with John McTiernan again (director of the first and third “Die Hard” movies)?

BW: I don’t know if they’re talking to John about it or not. We haven’t even got that far. They’re still working on the script.

H: OK. Matthew-

BW: But God bless you and Godspeed.

H: Oh, thank you very much. Matthew, it seems that since your rise to fame as Chandler on “Friends,” the film roles you’ve chosen, including “The Whole Ten Yards,” have been almost exclusively slapstick or romantic comedy-oriented. Is that a conscious decision on your part, and are your recent guest appearances on “The West Wing” an attempt to move away from that mould?

MP: I guess it’s – you kind of get typecast a little bit when you’re on a show like “Friends,” so most people think of me just doing comedy, and that’s what’s fun about “The Whole Nine Yards” and “The Whole Ten Yards” – it’s really slapstick, and it’s quite different than what “Friends” is. And yes, doing a few episodes of “The West Wing,” trying to change it up a bit, because that’s what actors try to do, is try to show the world all the sides of you – which I did in the bedroom scene with Bruce in this movie.
BW: Yes.

H: What were the easiest and hardest parts about getting back into the roles of Oz and Jimmy for you guys?

BW: Well, the easy part was working with the same funny crew of people again, who had a big, fun time on “Whole Nine Yards,” and we wanted to get together, and we were lucky enough to come up with the idea – or someone came up with the idea – of having Kevin Pollak play the father of the character that we killed in “Whole Nine Yards” in “Whole Ten Yards,” if that makes any sense-

MP: Yes, and the hardest part probably would be that people really liked the first movie, so we had a job ahead of us to kind of make a movie that people would like as much, and I think we pulled it off.

H: I was reading about how the director from the original “Whole Nine Yards” had said that Matthew was made of rubber because of all the stunts he did. In this movie, are you still doing a lot of stunts, or has it gotten harder? And Bruce and Matthew both, are you guys different people than when you first met on the set, and is Matthew done being scared of Bruce?

MP: I’ll never be done being scared of Bruce. No, that was kind of a fun challenge, because people seemed to like the physical humor in the first movie, so we tried to do that again, because it was one of the popular things in the first movie. So we did a lot of physical stuff. One of the cool things about the character of Oz is, he’s just scared of everything, so it gives an excuse to slam into things.

H: How about you, Bruce? Do you feel like you’ve changed, gotten funnier, wiser than from the first-?

BW: Well, you know what? I just think we’re better friends. We know each other better, we learned so much about each other’s comic timing on the first film. It was fun to kind of reload that and try and beat the first film, and try and be funnier and try and be more interesting, and have the film stand alone as an individual movie, if you hadn’t seen the first film, it being a sequel and all.

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