It’s hardly a Kevin Smith movie without Jay and Silent Bob, the respectively motor-mouthed and near-mute drug dealers who’ve provided comic relief and surprising insight in “Clerks,” “Mallrats,” “Chasing Amy,” “Dogma” and the cockeyed epic “Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.”
But the loquacious half of the duo, Jason Mewes (Smith himself pays Bob), was high as a kite–or jonesing to be–during most of those productions.
Sober for three years this past April, Mewes, 32, explains how shooting “Clerks II” was an entirely different experience for him.
“In the past, I was always ready to just bolt out and get high,” Mewes recalls. “If we’d do two takes, I’d go, `Dude, that’s fine.’ Really, I didn’t know if it was fine, but in my head I just wanted to go back to my trailer to do more drugs.
“The big difference this time was I was waking up early and looking forward to working. And I’d hang out after.”
Mewes’ old New Jersey buddy Smith certainly noticed the difference.
“It was a different beast altogether this time,” the director says of the actor, who has lived off and on in Smith’s home for years at a time.
“On most of the other flicks, he was always like, `Are we done? Can I leave? I wanna go party.’ This time there was none of that. He was happy to be there the whole time. He’d concentrate on the work, and even when he wasn’t working, he hung around.”
Mewes says that what made him decide to return from L.A. to Jersey–where there was an outstanding warrant that would likely lead to a long stint in rehab–was rejection by the one surrogate family he had been able to count on his whole adult life.
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“Of course, it was a combination of things,” reflects Mewes. “But the biggest thing was, I went to Kevin’s house on Thanksgiving. I knocked on the door, and no one in the family would come to say hi to me except for Kevin. And even he was like, `Look, I came down to say happy Thanksgiving, but it really hurts for me to see you like this.’ Then he teared up, gave me a hug and went back inside. That was a big eye-opener.”
Mewes enrolled in a four-day detox program that week.