Chris Evans’ Captain America had a signature protect. Zac Efron’s Chickie Donohue has a duffel bag full of brews.
Based on a true story, director Peter Farrelly’s conflict dramedy “The Greatest Beer Run Ever” (now streaming on Apple TV+) lives as much as its title with Chickie’s unbelievable and moderately loopy mission touring from New York City to ship cans of beer to his associates serving in Vietnam. He wants one thing to hold all that booze and his signature defining accent – apart from a candy Sixties mustache – is a inexperienced bag emblazoned with “Doc Fiddler’s” (the title of Chickie’s native bar).
During filming, “that bag did become a safety blanket for me. It was weird,” Efron tells USA TODAY. “The sun’s still coming up, we’d be rehearsing and if the bag wasn’t around, I wouldn’t know where I was supposed to be or where Chickie would be. I had to take into account that I’ve got this bag. Sometimes it would prevent me from sitting down or really from turning fully. I didn’t feel right without it.”
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Sometimes the bag served a sensible objective: In one scene, Chickie has the bag on his head throughout a storm to dam the rain. “They’ve become like a team,” Farrelly says. “It’s his buddy keeping him dry.”
Adds Efron: “Dry and inebriated.”
The quantity of beer cans decreases as Chickie finds his 4 associates and provides them beer, whereas making an attempt to not die or get arrested. But as a result of the film filmed scenes out of chronological order, Farrelly usually needed to do math to determine what number of beers wanted to be within the bag at any given time. “Luckily, that’s not my job,” Efron quips.
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They begin with 48 beers within the bag, and when Chickie first will get to Vietnam, he events all evening with a group of MPs, together with his pal Tom Collins (Archie Renaux). Farrelly figures they went by three instances. Chickie had one left afterward, and from there “we kept track along the way,” the director says. He had some within the foxhole with buddy Rick Duggan (Jake Picking) and fellow troopers, and later with different associates Kevin McLoone (Will Ropp) and Bobby Pappas (Kyle Allen), “and he had some just walking along.”
“Yeah, because he had nothing to drink,” Efron says. “He didn’t have bottled water.”
The bag was vital for Efron, however similar to a chilly one left untouched for a whereas, it received a little rank.
“After the first two weeks, that thing stunk, man,” Efron admits. “It was in the mud, the rain, it was carrying sweaty clothes and popped-open beers. At some point it started to mold on the inside. So this thing just gave off an odor. I would set the bag down and (go) over to some of the other actors and they’d go, ‘Jesus, what’s that smell?’ I’m like, ’It’s me.’
“I realized the bag had permeated my wardrobe fully, and it just stunk like moldy stale beer and sweat.”
This article initially appeared on USA TODAY: ‘The Greatest Beer Run Ever’: Zac Efron’s bag was a ‘security blanket’
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