BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., April 13, 2000 — Any name that follows Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito’s on the marquee for “The Big Kahuna” has quite the task at hand: Hold your own and try not to make your co-stars look bad. Or as Spacey says in the film, “We’re throwing you off a cliff and seeing if you can fly.”
The person being addressed is 26-year-old Peter Facinelli, a newcomer who garnered notice as Jennifer Love Hewitt’s popular, arrogant boyfriend in the teen flick “Can’t Hardly Wait” (and whose steely eyed stare provoked comparisons to a young Tom Cruise).
After more supporting roles in the indie comedy “Dancer, Texas Pop. 81” and the sci-fi failure “Supernova,” Facinelli gets thrown off the proverbial cliff with “The Big Kahuna,” a drama by first-time director John Swanbeck. The film, which takes place entirely in one hotel suite, follows three businessmen at a Wichita, Kans., convention who open up about their lives while waiting for an important potential client, aka “the big kahuna,” to appear.
Facinelli plays the naïve, deeply religious Bob, a researcher who attends his first convention with wide-eyed nervousness. He befriends Phil (DeVito), a recently divorced veteran salesman who is beginning to rethink his purpose in life but is taken aback by Larry (Spacey), a brash, blunt operator who’s hell-bent on snagging the big kahuna and persuading him to buy their industrial lubricants. As the evening progresses, however, the elder salesmen are surprised by their young co-worker’s actions, and the three embroil in debate, disagreement and, ultimately, discovery.
“That’s what really fascinates me,” says Facinelli, who looks neither like the well-pressed Bob nor the “Can’t Hardly Wait” superjock. “Because this was like one person at three different stages of his life, and my character is the one that comes in and thinks he knows the answers. Kevin’s character doesn’t want to ask the questions, doesn’t want to know the answers … and Danny’s character is just at a point in his life where’s he’s starting to ask questions and look for meaning and knows that he doesn’t have the answers. And you put those people in a room and they just learn and grow and feed off each other, and cause havoc and … you walk away thinking about your own life.”
So what did Facinelli think of his own character?
“I just felt he was a guy who had these beliefs that were instilled in him from a young age, and he kinda felt like he knew that was the way you were supposed to live your life. And so that’s how I kinda attacked it, from that standpoint. … And it’s almost a cocky thing but I think it came off as naïve. And I think there is a likability about him, but at the same time he really does screw things up, and you really feel for him because he’s going through a learning process.”
It was precisely the reaction director Swanbeck was hoping for. “The Big Kahuna” was a project he and old friend Spacey had been waiting to make for years, and the casting of the Scripture-quoting, evangelistic Bob was a key ingredient.
“Kevin and I wanted someone who would be a sucker punch for the audience,” Swanbeck says. “We wanted someone who, in a room full of people, would be the last person you’d expect to say the things his character says. That he would creep up on you over the course of the movie. And I looked at his demo tape first — I had a whole stack of more established actors — and I saw a versatility that I knew we would need for that subtle range he has to pull off as that character, and the versatility that I could work with as a director.”
Swanbeck stopped his search after Facinelli’s tape, and the role was his. While filming “The Big Kahuna” over just 16 nights, Facinelli was required to go head-to-head with both DeVito and Spacey and even wound up improvising a fistfight with the latter.
Facinelli, who has a 2-year-old daughter with “Beverly Hills, 90210” actress Jennie Garth, knows his lesser-known name won’t garner automatic sympathy for his character the way his high-profile co-stars will. But he rather likes it that way.
“One of the best compliments I can get is, ‘I didn’t know it was you in that movie,'” he says. “Because I want to be able to surprise an audience. I want people to come to my movies and say, ‘What’s he gonna do next?’ as opposed to saying, ‘Well, let’s go see him because we like that he does this.’ So for me, from ‘Supernova’ to ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’ to this is just doing completely different things and exploring different facets of myself and having fun and making movies and entertaining people.”
“The Big Kahuna” opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 28.
