Forgive the pun, but Vivica A. Fox is experiencing a career “resurgence” thanks to her role in the upcoming sequel to Independence Day — and at last night's panel discussion for the original movie's 20th anniversary Blu-ray release, the actress stole the show right out from under co-star Jeff Goldblum and director Roland Emmerich because she is a damn force of nature.
Dressed in a sparkly silver overcoat and matching heels, Fox was shot out of a cannon from the very first moment she hit the stage, waving enthusiastically to the hundreds of fans assembled at Fox's Zanuck Theater in Los Angeles who had settled in for a screening of the film's 20th anniversary edition. It only got better from there.
“I took the character very literal,” she said when asked about her audition for the original film. “I heard she was a stripper, and I showed up with this tight, patent leather, white pants, jumpsuit, with the boobs and everything. And I'll never forget that the casting director told me, 'It's a good thing you can act. Because I would not have called you back…this character is a stripper with a heart of gold.' And I said, 'Oh, okay! I get it.' So she gave me some instructions how to come back for the callback. She said, 'go watch 'Speed' or something like that…girl next door. Don't come back in here with that patent leather white outfit on.'”
It was funny! Fox is a deft storyteller. But the night's biggest showstopper arrived when the actress described shooting with the original film's onscreen pooch Boomer, who could not keep his sweaty paws off her during production.
“Boomer was the horniest thing I've ever seen in my life,” she said, turning to Emmerich. “You remember Boomer humping on me all the time? I was trying to have my heroic moment, I'm like, 'I've got the kid, I've got everything,' and Boomer's like —
[stands up and begins wildly humping the air; audience explodes]
“'Yeah, you sure do, you sure do, Vivica. Yeah, baby!'”
[sits back down]
“Ain't no one knew I went through that. …The trainer's going, 'he does that when he gets tired…when he get tired, he just start humping.'”
“That's what I do when I get tired,” deadpanned Goldblum. “I'm feeling a little woozy now.”
We all were, Jeff.
For those interested, Goldblum was surprisingly prolific when it came to describing both where his character is in the sequel and the state of the movie's fictional world post-1996:
“Since then, I've been given this job as so-called Director Earth-Space Defense. So it's my job to now be one of the leaders with this new technology, and mainly to anticipate and analyze and figure out if anything's coming back — who those guys were the first time — if they're coming back, and if there's gonna be more trouble and how we prepare ourselves. So there's new technology from the downed spacecraft, that we can use for those purposes, for defense, we have a military base on the moon and one of the moon of Saturn, and orbiting things that are gonna anticipate — but the question of who they were is very interesting, and some of those questions get answered in this movie. But I've also been involved in using a technology to handle environmental challenges that the whole planet has. And we've rebuilt — that war of '96 was a species-changing, world-transforming event. Three billion people died. So we've spent 20 years grieving terrifically, but rebuilding effectively because not a shot has been fired amongst ourselves. The human family has transcended all religious, political, national, petty differences and come together. How about that?”
Independence Day: 20th Anniversary Edition is now available on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD (you can buy it here via Google Play). Resurgence hits theaters on June 24.