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Harry Enfield, co-writer, played Kevin
We’d done Kevin and Perry on Harry Enfield and Chums and thought it would be fun to make a Wayne’s World-y thing while we still had the impetus of the TV programme. I went on holiday and Dave Cummings, who’d written for Harry Enfield and Chums, did the first draft. I came back and took over. A month later, it was all happening. It was really quick.
We were given £3.5m to shoot over 12 days in Ibiza. The nightclub scenes were all filmed in one day and night at Amnesia. The scene in which Kevin and Perry get puked on by some clubbers was filmed in the afternoon. We invented the Inbetweeners basically! They couldn’t shut the club in the evening, so the crowd weren’t extras. They were actual clubbers, having a good night, and the DJs were actually DJing. I said to DJs Seb Fontaine and Roger Sanchez: “Do you mind if I just come and interrupt your set?”
When I was that age, it was punk. We’d go and see the Clash and the Pistols. They’d be horrible to us and we’d go: “Brilliant!” I once asked Pistols drummer Paul Cook: “Can you write something funny on my trousers?” So he wrote: “Something funny.” Eyeball Paul, the character played by Rhys Ifans, is our equivalent: the nastier he is to to us, the more we like him.
The notorious scene in which poo goes into my mouth wasn’t in the script. Originally it was a scene where Kevin and Perry went on a boat trip with the girls, who all ignored them. But when we got to the jetty to film it, there was no sign of the boat. Ed Bye, the director, said: “What the fuck are we going to do?” We had to think of something else. I’d been swimming at the same beach a few years before and there had been a great big human poo next to me. I said: “Get a bit of polystyrene, paint it brown, put some sweetcorn on it like eyes and pull it with fishing line so it looks like it’s going in my mouth. And Kathy, you go in the water and look like you’ve just shat in the sea.”
The film is fun and silly, but quite sweet because you feel sorry for Kevin and Perry. It’s very English. When they screened it in America, people hated it so much they wanted to burn the cinema down. In France, the poster read: “Kevin et Perry, un film trash.”
I’m a bit too old for a sequel now. I did once write Kevin and Perry Go to Wizard School, but nobody ever replied. That’s the English film industry, I’m afraid.
Kathy Burke, played Perry
I’d been one of Harry Enfield’s “Chums”, playing Waynetta Slob, Lulu the Toddler and Perry. I’d just won the 1997 best actress award in Cannes for Nil By Mouth when Harry said he might be able to get funds for a Kevin and Perry movie. Was I up for it? I thought: “Too right, mate!”
I left the script to Harry and Dave Cummings. Louisa Rix continued in her role as Kevin’s mum, Mrs Patterson. Perry and Mrs Patterson have this little twinkle between them: Perry is very much in lust with Mrs Patterson and she is very much in amusement with him. It was always great fun working with Louisa.
Since we were playing a couple of hormonal, randy teenagers, Harry and I were fitted with electronic penises that worked by remote control. Sexy ladies walked past and – boing! – up went the appendages. The crew were a lively bunch too, and we’d congregate in a bar at the end of a day’s filming and drink Choccy-Woccy, a lethal brandy, vodka and milk chocolate concoction that Rhys Ifans invented. It went down far too easily yet for some reason caused minimal hangovers.
When we did the press circuit, I was surprised by how many journalists asked if this kind of comedy movie was maybe a bit lowbrow. Most of the parts I’d been offered since Cannes were extremely boring – just carbon copies of my previous roles. As a woman in my mid-30s, when else would I have the opportunity to play a 14-year-old boy? It’s surprising but very lovely that, nearly 30 years on, people still talk to me about Kevin and Perry. They hold a special place in some old hearts. As Perry would say: “Fank yoo!”
