David Spade Knows Nobody Wants to See ‘Tommy Boy 2’ Starring David Spade
As much as David Spade probably needs a break from Dana Carvey interrupting him on the Fly on the Wall podcast, he knows the idea of a Tommy Boy sequel without Chris Farley is immensely dumb.
“I was pitched a Tommy Boy 2, which was our kids are together,” Spade told Theo Von this week on the comedian’s This Past Weekend podcast. “I was pitched it two years ago. And I’m like, I just can’t find a scenario with no Farley.”
Von, the comic with the Joe Dirt haircut, tried to imagine how producers could get around the problem. Would they recreate Farley with CGI? Hire one of Farley’s brothers?
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The focus would have been on the original characters’ kids, Spade explained. “And then I was going to come help them on the road or something. But listen, the magic in the bottle was Chris. I had a good part. I had a lot of fun in it, but it was about Christopher. If we did another one back then, it would’ve been a blast.”
The funny thing is that Spade and Farley did do a sequel to Tommy Boy — sort of, anyway. They just called it Black Sheep.
The plot is essentially the same: A doofus family member (Farley) has to make good with the help of a sarcastic sycophant (Spade). Lorne Michaels called Black Sheep “an act of desperation” by Paramount after the studio realized it did a poor job of promoting Tommy Boy. Black Sheep was a do-over, using the same formula that worked, to much better effect, in Farley and Spade’s first movie team-up.
“Black Sheep was sort of the same type of movie,” Spade acknowledged, though he knew it wasn’t nearly as funny. In hindsight, Spade told Von they should have kept director Pete Segal and just done a follow-up to Tommy Boy.
A 1990s version of Tommy Boy 2 had to have been better than Black Sheep. Film critic Gene Siskel hated that comedy, one of only three movies he ever walked out on. And while Spade told Von that he liked Black Sheep, he feuded with director Penelope Spheeris throughout the production, telling her, “You’ve spent this whole movie trying to cut my comedy balls off,” according to The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts.
The feeling was mutual. Spheeris told Cracked that Farley was “a pleasure to work with,” while Spade was “kind of a pain in the ass.”
Spade knows Tommy Boy 2 could never fly today. “It would be too much of a sellout,” said the star of Grown Ups 2, Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania and Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser. “I can’t imagine. I mean, no one could do that.”
