Dylan Sprouse and Virginia Gardner Talk Beautiful Wedding and Dream Location For A Potential Third Film

In Beautiful Disaster, Dylan Sprouse and Virginia Gardner play a bad boy boxer and former poker star who meet in college and can’t resist their mutual attraction to each other. The duo return for the sequel Beautiful Wedding that picks up after a crazy night in Vegas that leaves them as accidental newlyweds. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke with the actors about reuniting for the new film.

After working together on After We Collided and Beautiful Disaster, it was a no brainer for Sprouse and director Roger Kumble to join forces again. This time around they embraced more comedy and improvisation. “That's the nature of working with the same group of people,” Sprouse told me. “This movie was certainly more of a comedy than the first one. I love improv’ing, myself, and Roger made that very easy on set to do for all of us. Our kind of quad main actors are really comfortable with each other so we had a lot of fun doing that.”

The sequel even has some hilarious callbacks to the first film Beautiful Disaster. “Throwing up on Dylan's face. Always a good day of work for me when I get to do that,” laughed Gardner about her favorite scene to recreate again. Sprouse agreed, joking: “That was my favorite, personally, cleaning up. Ginny kept asking to do that scene again. She didn't quite feel like she got her performance right so asked I think like six or seven times.”

“I had to make sure my performance was spot on,” said Gardner. “A very important performance moment for me.”

While Sprouse’s character Travis Maddox is a boxer, this film puts Gardner’s Abby Abernathy in the ring for the first time. “It was really fun and I think the benefit that I had is Abby is not actually a fighter. There was pressure on Dylan to look like he knew what he was doing. I had no pressure on me to look like I had to know what I was doing. I just got to have fun and be silly. It really wasn't choreographed,” Gardner shared. “We were figuring it out as we went along so it was fun to have that much freedom in the fight scene and not need to worry about looking like my form is correct.”

Life imitates art as, similarly to their characters, both Sprouse and Gardner have each respectively married their partners recently. “I certainly think it helps add a little bit of understanding of what the fear of the characters is when you're thinking about getting married or the struggle of planning a wedding or the struggle of planning a honeymoon,” said Sprouse while making jokes. “It definitely can root it in a bit of reality, but I think those character’s situation is very different from our own situations personally. They were also 19 getting married and, you know, we're like at least 60, 70 years old.”

Gardner’s real life husband Jed Elliott, bassist of The Struts, even makes a cameo in the film. “There's a beautiful character named Jimothy that has a little tambourine. He’s outside of the Lucha Libre tent and I get to grab him by the nose and take him out of the frame. My husband and I had a lot of fun with that little cameo,” she shared. “It was his first time acting so he was so nervous. He was rehearsing that stupid song he sings in the movie. Sang it all night, all day.”

Even though he’s a musician, he wasn’t prepared for the film set experience. “Then as soon as they start rolling and the camera was on his face, he forgot the words completely. Afterwards he was like, ‘Ginny, there's so many people behind the camera.’ He's like, ‘I had no idea there's that many people behind the camera.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, babe, there's like a crew there,’” Gardner said. “He was so nervous and he's such a performer too. I know he is. Roger was like, ‘What's happening? Your husband's in a band.’ I was like, ‘I don't know. He's nervous. I've never seen him nervous.’”

Gardner called the mud scene the most “challenging” to film. “That was like two days in real mud, not fake mud. There was rocks in it and the mosquitoes were super drawn to it. Pretty sure they were laying eggs in it. It was pretty nasty and I'm grateful it was Rob Estes in there with me. He was a great sport as well,” she shared. “But that was a tough scene for me. Then they cut a lot of it, so that always adds insult to injury when you spend a lot of time on something and it ends up on the cutting room floor.”

Sprouse added that director Kumble also had a cameo in the film that ended up getting cut. “Must be weird to cut yourself out of your own movie,” laughed Sprouse.

Over the course of these first two movies, the team has filmed in Bulgaria and the Dominican Republic. If they were to make another, Sprouse brought up Ireland as a cool place to film next. “Oh, I like Ireland. You got the pubs,” said Gardner, throwing out an idea for a third film. “They're going to have a little Irish tiny fighting baby child. It's gonna come out with a pint of Guinness.”

Beautiful Wedding releases on digital and on demand on February 13.