Zac Efron says the original title for A Family Affair helped “the script stay at the top of the pile” at Netflix.
The weekend was a big one at the box office with Inside Out 2 becoming the first movie of the year to cross $1 billion, but there was also some excitement happening over on streaming. The highly-anticipated new Netflix romance, A Family Affair, is now available to watch on the streamer. The film stars Zac Efron as a fictional movie star named Chris Cole with a young assistant, Zara Ford (Joey King), with big goals. Their relationship isn’t exactly good, and things get even worse when Chris starts daring Zara’s mother, Brooke Harwood (Nicole Kidman). During an interview with People, Efron revealed the original title of the film was NSFW.
“It was called Motherf*cker,” Efron revealed. “Beeped out,” Kidman clarified. “Somehow that didn’t make it onto the Netflix title.”
“That made the script stay at the top of the pile,” Efron added. “It’s like, what on Earth could this be about?”
Zac Efron Filmed a Fake Hot Ones for A Family Affair:
Zac Efron on Hot Ones in 2020.
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Hot Ones is the hit interview show hosted by Sean Evans that sees actors opening up about their careers while eating hot wings. Many many A-listers have appeared on the show since its inception, including Efron back in 2020. However, when you see footage of the actor doing a Hot Ones in A Family Affair, it was actually new footage shot for the film. In the movie, you see a highlight reel of Efron’s career that uses both real and fictional footage. A Family Affair’s director, Richard LaGravenese, confirmed Efron filmed an entire Hot Ones in character, but the whole thing didn’t make the cut.
“That sequence was a long time in the making,” LaGravenese told TheWrap with a laugh. “I mean, getting it just right and getting the different pieces. And we wanted it to be most of the most current form of Zac. So some things we staged, like his date, but a lot of the ones, really, was just sort of a rhythm thing that went with the music, and we just needed to show that he was a global star.”
“We had originally shot a full episode of the Hot Ones, which I’m sorry we don’t get to show, which was a full interview that Sean and Zac did together that was filled with a lot of funny improvs and things like that,” LaGravenese added. “But it was too time-consuming and we couldn’t put the whole thing in there. But that was part of what the opening was going to be.”
“It was really fun. We had four cameras, and the two of them just went at it, like over and over. It was really fun to film, Sean was delightful. He was really great to work with,” he added.
A Family Affair is now streaming on Netflix.
