Kevin Smith Talks Jason Mewes’ Sobriety and Their Emotional Scene in Madness in the Method

Kevin Smith visited his home town of Red Bank, New Jersey this weekend for the opening of his latest Mooby’s pop-up as well as the Jay & Silent Bob Get Old 10th-anniversary event. Smith originally started the podcast with Jason Mewes ten years ago as a way to help his friend stay sober. In fact, Smith recently celebrated Mewes’ ten years of sobriety on Instagram, saying, “It’s been an excellent decade in which we both grew closer because Jay made the choice to keep it clean. It’s hard governing your habits but Jay does it daily now – and because he does, he makes our lives fun and profitable!” ComicBook.com caught up with Smith at Mooby’s and asked how the podcast has changed now that Mewes has stayed sober for so long and what it was like filming their emotional fight scene in Madness in the Method.

“I mean, every episode that we do, he still does like, ‘How many days you’ve been clean and sober?’ And then he announces the number, and everyone claps. But it began as the thing to keep him on the straight and narrow. And it really worked. And then it wound up becoming the thing that made him a living more than anything else. Jay bought his house off of Jay and Silent Bob Get Old,” Smith shared.

“But the kid, once Logan was born, that’s what keeps him straight. He’ll never f*ck up because of that kid. The kid thinks he hung the moon, like absolutely loves him. You’ve never seen a tighter relationship between parent and child… She’s adorable. So he has stayed clean, I think, for her, more than anything else. But the podcast helped in the beginning for sure… It also helped in terms of like, this sounds so weird because he’s f*cking 45, which means we’ve been doing this for 10 years, so he was 35 when we started, but it taught him how to be an adult for lack of a better description. It taught him responsibility, accountability.”

“He was only ever really accountable to us and nobody held him accountable to anything, because it was like he was our friend. But once we started the podcast, suddenly strangers could be like, ‘You clean? You still sober?’ And suddenly there was a responsibility to live up to. And it taught him to be a bit of a grownup right before he had to really be a grownup, like which when the kid came along. So the timing of it couldn’t have been better. But yeah, at a certain point, I was like, the podcast is kind of outward evidence of his sobriety. But all you have to do is look at that kid to see is the center, the battery of his sobriety.”

As for Mewes’ directorial debut, Madness in the Method, both he and Smith played themselves in the movie and had an emotional fight about their history and Mewes’ past indiscretions. However, Smith revealed that those feelings didn’t carry over after they stopped filming.

“I wish I could tell you that they said, ‘Action.’ And I was like, ‘I need a minute. I got to walk this off. It’s still mad at him.’ But they were like, ‘Cut.’ And I was like, ‘You are f*cking good, dude.’ And he was like, ‘Right? So were you? I thought you were mad.’”

“I saw the movie. I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ Like I was a little disappointed that Reboot was happening at the same time because that could have been its own six months of our lives, where we just toured with that movie, which he directed, which was good, and we were both in.”

Madness in the Method is currently available to rent or buy on Amazon.