The just-released trailer for Jay & Silent Bob Reboot featured numerous cameos from Hollywood icons, former Kevin Smith co-stars and collaborators, and comedians who joined the cast of the meta-sequel. In some cases, the actors seem to be playing characters from previous Smith movies, while in other cases, the camera pans past them too fast to be sure.
In any event, there was a lot of buzz around the trailer, which debuted over the weekend and then got screened at Smith’s “Kevin Smith Reboots Hall H” panel at Comic Con International in San Diego.
Videos by ComicBook.com
You can check out the ones we spotted below (along with some final thoughts in the last slide), and leave us a comment (or hit me up at @russburlingame on Twitter) if we missed anything. You can also get tickets to see Jay & Silent Bob Reboot right now, for screenings in October at Regal Cinemas and other participating exhibitors through Fathom Events.
Ben Affleck
Smith shared a lengthy story about Affleck’s return to the View Askewniverse, and this one actually hardly counts, except that it has been so long since the two of them worked together.
According to Smith, an interview with entertainment journalist Kevin McCarthy called his attention to Affleck’s willingness to take a part in Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, but by the time he summoned the courage to call his old friend, most of the movie had already been cast and the filmmaker ended up writing an 8-page scene for Affleck, which serves as a mini-sequel to Chasing Amy and, from the moment you catch in the trailer, suggests that Holden McNeil has a Bluntman-related podcast.
Matt Damon
It appears from wardrobe alone that Matt Damon is playing Loki, his character from Dogma, in the film (not to be confused with Loki, the Marvel villain he played in a play-within-the-movie in Thor: Ragnarok). Of course, given the meta nature of this movie, he could be Matt Damon playing a movie version of Loki, or a Loki cosplayer at Chronic Con who just happens to look like Matt Damon.
Chris Hemsworth
Speaking of Thor: Ragnarok, its star Chris Hemsworth appears in the film, although from the half-a-beat glimpse we got of him it looks like he will be playing a character more in line with his handsome-but-dumb character from Ghostbusters than the god of thunder.
During Smith’s Hall H panel, he related the story of bringing Hemsworth to Louisiana to appear in the film. According to Smith, Hemsworth was sandwiching the appearance in between at least two major talk shows, a commercial shoot, and a promised trip with his family — but he told Smith that shooting Jay & Silent Bob Reboot was the thing he was looking forward to the most that weekend.
“That’s how good an actor Thor is,” Smith quipped to the audience.
Melissa Benoist
Supergirl herself makes an appearance (squaring off against another actor who has some DC history, which we will get to soon) in the new film, playing the role of Chronic, a gender-swapped version of the character inspired by Jay in the movie-within-a-movie.
Val Kilmer
The star of Batman Forever appears as Bluntman, the pot-fueled Silent Bob/Batman hybrid who squares off against Benoists’s Chronic.
“I hit Val up about coming to play with us on Reboot while he was in town,” Smith said in a recent social media post. “Val wrote ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard, but my voice isn’t quite back yet. Perhaps I can play some poor cousin to Silent Bob?’ I wrote back ‘I think I’ve got the *perfect* cameo for you, if you’re cool with it.’ And thus, Bluntman began!”
Tommy Chong
The stoner icon and star of Up in Smoke with Cheech Marin will appear in the movie as Alfred, the butler to Bluntman and Chronic.
Yes, really.
Jason Biggs & James Van Der Beek
Appearing at Chronic Con, a convention centered around Bluntman & Chronic, the actors who played Bluntman & Chronic in the 2001 movie (and were jumped by Jay, Bob, and Suzanne the monkey in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back) have some pretty hot takes about the reboot.
Joe Manganiello
He might be Deathstroke to DC fans, but here he’s playing a bailiff who, apparently, hated the Biggs and Van Der Beek Bluntman and Chronic movie.
…Might he finally get to share the screen with Ben Affleck?!
Diedrich Bader
He played a security guard in 2001’s Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, and this time around…well…!
Justin Long
Appealing to a judge (we’ll get to that later), Kevin Smith’s Live Free or Die Hard co-star Justin Long appears in the courtroom scenes, objecting to a negative characterization of the original Bluntman & Chronic movie.
Craig Robinson
The judge in that scene was Craig Robinson, who appears in Zack and Miri Make a Porno (as well as something called The Office).
Fred Armisen
In the trailer, Armisen plays an Uber driver who talks about someone having stunk up his car the previous week by pooping their pants. So there’s that to look forward to.
He isn’t the only Uber driver in the movie, either, by the way. But more on that another time.
Brian Quinn
Brian Quinn, who appears on Smith’s Tell ‘Em Steve-Dave podcast and serves as one of the hosts on Impractical Jokers (just renewed for a ninth season by TruTV), appears in the film as a Bluntman cosplayer who is apparently not entirely thrilled about the reboot.
Method Man
Rapper, producer, and comic book fan Method Man makes his way into the film, which begs the question: when will fellow rap superstar and comic book nerd Darryl McDaniels/DMC show up in a Kevin Smith movie?
Redman
Redman, who collaborates regularly with Method Man and who tends to sing a lot about weed, shows up in the trailer as well, with the pair joining forces to dispense (see what I did there?) a little wisdom to Jay and Bob.
David Mandel
David Mandel, the creator of Veep and executive producer of Clerks: The Cartoon with Smith, appeared in Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, in which he stood in front of a bus and drank coffee.
Driector Kevin Smith recently revealed that Mandel will reprise the role in Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, but that his character has evolved in the last 15+ years: he will be double-fisting coffee outside of a Mooby’s fast food restaurant this time.
“Twenty years ago, I played an extra drinking coffee,” joked Mandel in an episode of Smith’s Road to Reboot webseries tracking the progress of Jay & Silent Bob Reboot. “And now I’m back.” He expressed that his only regret is that he did not have time to grow a beard and goatee so that he could show some character growth during the intervening years.
David Dastmalchian
One of the first faces you see in the film is David Dastmalchian, who is probably best known for his roles in the Ant-Man films but who also has appeared in a wide variety of movies and TV shows, including The Flash and The Dark Knight.
Oddly, his presence means that there are actors from the Schumacher (Kilmer), Nolan (Dastmalchian) and Snyder (Affleck) Batman franchises all in the same place, along with representatives of the Marvel and DC TV universes.
…And plenty more
According to IMDb, there are a bunch more cameo appearances that we cannot confirm just by looking at the trailer, including The Flash cast members Grant Gustin, Carlos Valdes, and Tom Cavanagh. The final cut of the movie will likely include even more than IMDb already knows about.
There is also, as we mentioned at the top of this, the question of Smith’s recurring characters. Some of those — Affleck and Damon, for instance — we referenced above, but actors like Rosario Dawson, Joey Lauren Adams, Jason Lee, and Brian O’Halloran are set to return in the film, and didn’t get shouted out above because those feel more like roles and less like celebrity cameos.
You can see them all when Jay & Silent Bob Reboot comes to theaters this October from Fathom Events and then goes on the road with Kevin Smith.
