Screenwriter Kay Cannon reveals why she fought against the team’s appearance, plus her favorite cover of “Cups.”


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Pitch Perfect 2 is full of surprises, from the celebrity cameos that dot the cast to the substantial $70 million it earned in its initially weekend at the domestic box office. But one of the film’s ideal surprises—an appearance by several Green Bay Packers at an underground “riff-off” singing competition—practically didn’t take place. And it wouldn’t have taken place if writer Kay Cannon had acquired her means.

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“The whole time Elizabeth Banks and Max Banks’s husband and also a producer on the film>, they were basically saying to me, ‘The Environment-friendly Bay Packers are going to be in this movie,’” Cannon recalls. “And I was like, ‘No they're not.’” It’s not that Cannon believed burly football players had no duty in her girl-power comedy—a Chicback native and also a football fan, Cannon was so committed to her hometvery own Bears she refoffered to put the spotlight on the hated rival Packers. “My dad passed ameans while I was writing the sequel,” she defines. “I was choose, ‘My dad is rolling over in his grave ideal now if the Green Bay Packers are in it.’”

The totality thing started when David Bakhtiari, an offensive lineguy for the Packers, tweeted at Banks about his love for the movie, and also inevitably asked for a cameo in the sequel. Says Cannon, “They sassist, ‘If you put us in the sequel, we will practice, we will rehearse, we’ll take it as a major thing. We’re athletes, this is what we carry out. We‘ll really work at it.’”


And, as so regularly happens in Hollytimber, the screenwriter was overruled—though Cannon can now admit it functioned out for the ideal. “Once they were for sure in, it was actually super fun to compose those bits, to compose those jokes and also to have them be certain, prefer Clay Matthews saying, ‘There’s nobody who loves more tenderly than I.’” Cannon was on set for a lot of Pitch Perfect 2, but not for the riff-off, so when she initially experienced the film, seated beside the first film’s director, Jachild Moore, it was nearly an out-of-body endure. “I leaned over to him and also I was choose, ‘I feel choose I’m watching a dream,’” she remembers. “You never imagine that the Environment-friendly Bay Packers were going to be in something you wrote or singing ‘Bootylicious.’”


For a writer and also actress who’s still fairly unrecognized, Cannon has already had actually a significant social impact, initially as one of the authors for 30 Rock who helped define the now-iconic character of Liz Lemon (“I think Liz Lemon’s love of cheese was !”), and then as the writer of the first Pitch Perfect, which resulted in the substantial viral hit song “Cups.” Her favorite cover of the fiercely beloved song continues to be one videotaped by 12-year-old boys in Dublin, “dancing without any problem that anybody was watching them.” Though the Pitch Perfect movies have a reputation for being female-powered—one that will only be strengthened by the sequel’s enormous box-office take from a 72 percent female audience—Cannon knows guys laugh at her movies too. “You simply tell a good story wright here you’re funny and it provides civilization laugh,” she claims. “I think dudes enjoy it also.”

Though the success of Pitch Perfect 2 may have eexceptionally studio leaving her voice mails this week, Cannon still plans to go back to television, on a task she can’t yet comment on. As a lot as the life of a screenwriter—functioning on a single job for months—might seem saner than the life of a TV writer—working long hrs in a crowded writer’s room week after week—Cannon clearly embraces the fierce work ethic she learned on 30 Rock. “It’s this wonderful family and also you’re having the time of your life and you’re laughing prefer crazy, yet you’re also choose, ‘I gotta carry out this. I gotta acquire better. I gotta learn more.’” Sounds choose the sort of competitiveness, unified through utter silliness, the Barden Bellas would appreciate.

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Katey Rich is Vanity Fair’s Awards and also Audio Editor.

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