Prom Interview with McDonell & Teegarden
There are hundreds of nights in high school, but there's only one Prom. In theaters April 29, it will all go down for a group of high school seniors in the new movie Prom (rated PG).
Scholastic spoke with two of the stars from the movie, Aimee Teegarden and Thomas McDonell. PS, Thomas is pretty cute!
Q: Tell us about your characters in Prom.
Aimee: She's type-A personality. Everything has to be perfect in her world. Overachiever, which is kind of why she's, you know, prom committee president and class president and you name it. She's um, she's very preppy.
Thomas: He is the outsider character, sort of loner, troubled. He has problems with his family and gets in fights, but he's not a bad guy. He's just misunderstood by the school. He doesn't like school. He doesn't really know what he likes exactly. He doesn't want to be at school. He wants to graduate, but he doesn't know what he wants to do. But you know, he changes pretty dramatically by the end of the film.
Q: Is the long-hair look you or is that just for the character?
Thomas: A little bit of both. [Laughter]
Q: What's your favorite scene in the movie?
Thomas: My favorite so far is probably in the scene in the art room where Aimee's character and mine are making decorations, and it's sort of how they get to know each other better a lot in there kind of. They're short scenes but there's a lot that happens.
Q: Did you get together before shooting or did they just dump you on set saying, "Here's your girlfriend/boyfriend"?
Thomas: Not really. We did the screen test together. I don't know if it actually happened this way, but it felt to me as if they picked the pair together. I don't know if that's true, but that's how it felt. And I know that it doesn’t always happen like this but the film has been sort of chronologically in order. So we've sort of gotten to know each other through filming. You know we film the stuff where they don't like each other in the beginning and they don't know each other at the beginning, and then we know each other. So it sort of followed the path of in real life.
Aimee: I got a call that they wanted to do a final audition in L.A., so I went and did a mix and match with five other guys, but Thomas was the first guy to come in, and he was absolutely fantastic.
Q: Did you go to prom yourself?
Aimee: I did go to prom. It was good. I had a good prom. I went with a boyfriend. I wore – it was like an over-the-knee, turquoise, sparkly number. Spaghetti-strap. It had this giant satin belt thing. It also had a giant bow in the back.
Thomas: I went to prom when I was 18. I went with my girlfriend at the time in Massachusetts. We were on a boat, out on a boat. I think we just decided we would go together. There was some talk about whether or not to go, you know, whether or not it would be any fun. It wasn't that much fun, but, you know, we decided together that we would go.
Q: What must a girl/guy never do on a date? What's your pet peeve?
Aimee: Ooo, pick up and play with his cell phone. That's a huge pet peeve. That's disrespectful.
Thomas: [Laughs.] Pet peeve. . . I don't like red heads. Just kidding. [Laughter] I'm easy going. It doesn't matter.
Q: Are you ready for heartthrob status and what comes with it?
Thomas: No. [Laughter] A lot of people have a lot of ideas about that, a lot of good advice. People like to give advice about that stuff. People who give advice about that often are not the people who maybe should be giving advice about it.
Q: What books made a difference when you were growing up?
Thomas: We read a lot of stuff in the school that I went to. I think in a row we read The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Yea, when I was in like sixth or seventh grade or something. I remember those were actually pretty heavy.
Aimee: My favorite book growing up was The Secret Garden. Classic.
Q: What do you want audiences to take away from the movie?
Aimee: I think the idea would be that, you know, everybody has this idea of their perfect senior year of high school and how great things are going to be and in reality high school's not perfect. It's life. I think that no matter where you go to school or what type of school you go to there's all those teenage problems you go through, whether it's breaking up with a boyfriend, or having girl drama, or, you know, not getting asked to prom, and there are so many things. I think that with this movie I feel like a lot of people are going to be able to relate and just enjoy it.
This movie sounds good! Are you going to go see it? Let us know in the Comments.
— Interviews by Marie Morreale
Photos courtesy of Disney
