Jennifer Grey is revealing how exactly she plans to approach and prepare for the newest Dirty Dancing reboot. She originated the role of Frances “Baby” Houseman alongside Patrick Swayze as Johnny Castle. Grey is both starring in and executive producing the reboot and says that she’s “really committed to getting it right and to doing right by the fans.”
She continues, “I just feel an enormous responsibility to the place it holds in people’s hearts and what made it so special… and to do it without Patrick is just unthinkable.
How Jennifer Grey plans to prepare for the ‘Dirty Dancing’ reboot
“It has to have something fresh and it has to be about real stuff, which is what the original movie was… but it was really about identity and class and feeling that, you know, the world’s not made for you.”
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Although Grey speaks so highly of Swayze, an article came out last year alleging that the two did not get along on set. “He felt like she was a wimp,” Dirty Dancing producer Linda Gottlieb tells The Huffington Post. “She was authentic, naive; you would take eight times and Jennifer would do it differently each time. Patrick was a pro; it would deliver the same thing over and over again. She cried easily, she was emotional and he made fun of her somehow. He was a macho guy. “
The tension between them made the movie what it is
Swayze even shared his frustrations with his co-star in his autobiography, The best time of my life. “She seemed particularly emotional, sometimes bursting into tears if someone criticized her,” he writes in his book. “Other times, she would slip into silly moods, forcing us to do scenes over and over again when she started to laugh,” and adds that, he “didn’t have much patience to do it several times.”
Ultimately, their tension made Dirty Dancing one of the most memorable moves of all time. “The two have contributed so much every day,” said choreography Kenny Ortega. “Sometimes it was a conflict; sometimes it was love. There was something between the two of them that was inexplicable. They were human fireworks. ”