Clerks star Brian O’Halloran will return for Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, the actor has confirmed.
Videos by ComicBook.com
The obvious expectation would be that O’Halloran might play Dante Hicks, his character from the first two Clerks movies and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, but during an interview at Wizard World Chicago this past weekend, the actor suggested that he might play multiple roles, drawing on Dante’s various look–alikes and family members played by O’Halloran in Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Dogma.
“Yes, I’m definitely going to be a part of that,” O’Halloran told ComicBook.com. “We’re going to have a couple of very funny bits with the Kevin Smith characters that I’ve portrayed. I’ve portrayed a number of them at this point, so I think we’re going to bring a variety of them back.”
O’Halloran had been expected to reprise the role of Dante in Clerks 3, but the project fell apart, allegedly because his co-star Jeff Anderson was not interested in returning (although nobody has ever explicitly named Anderson as the holdout).
Later, O’Halloran was one of about a dozen of director Kevin Smith‘s regular acting troupe who was slated to return for Mallrats 2. That film evolved into a TV series, and the TV series did not get picked up. Smith is said to be weighing the possibility of using one or both of those stories for comics.
O’Halloran spoke briefly to those projects, suggesting that they may not be entirely dead, but it is largely up to Smith and the whims of studios who might be interesting in distributing them.
When Mallrats 2 was happening, numerous actors from the first film and other Smith films, including Sven Ole-Thorsen, Michael Rooker, Stan Lee, and Joey Lauren Adams, announced they would return. If, as he did with Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, Smith hopes to bring together numerous threads of his shared “View Askewniverse,” it could be inferred that all or most of those actors will return.
In the director’s commentary for Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, Smith noted that while he had gathered numerous actors from his first four films together to reprise their previous roles for a fake movie premiere, nobody had thought to take a group photo of the results. As with any good reboot, maybe this time around Smith will have a chance to make up for that.
