'It was shady and dishonest!' Why Freddie Prinze Jr 'didn't enjoy' working on Scooby-Doo
Freddie Prinze Jr. considered quitting 'Scooby-Doo' after the script was drastically changed just before shooting started.
Freddie Prinze Jr. "didn't enjoy" working on 'Scooby-Doo.'
The 47-year-old actor starred as Fred in the big-screen adaptation of the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon series alongside wife Sarah Michelle Gellar in 2002 but admitted that when he and the gang were landed with a new script after they had already signed their contracts, he almost "freaked out" and considered quitting altogehter.
He told Collider: "The love that your generation and a couple others have had for that movie really changed my perspective on the whole experience, because it wasn't exactly the best experience going in. When we read that script…and I said this probably ten years ago, and people got really mad at me, and then James [Gunn] said it ten years after and everyone was like, "Hey, how dare Warner Brothers." But they did the bait and switch on us, you know what I mean? We read the script, we all signed on, we flew to Australia, we landed. They didn't even let us go to our residence first. We had to go straight to the studio and we were given a new script that was basically rated G. Well, I don't want to speak for everyone, so I'll just speak for myself, but I kind of freaked out and thought about walking off the movie.
"But my girlfriend Sarah [Michelle Gellar] was there, and I was there, and I didn't want to leave her for six months. And I don't like quitting, so I just sort of justified everything in my head and said, "You’ve got to just commit to this, and make it as good as you can make it, and just hope for the best." But it was difficult because what I felt was some shadiness and dishonesty as far as getting us all out there, so I never enjoyed it.."
However, the 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' star went on to add that after realising that a generation of children had held on to the movie as it approached its 10th and 20th anniveraries, he has lean
He added: "And then all of a sudden, all these kids…not kids, they were older, they were in their twenties at this point, started coming up to me almost every day. I would go out and they'd be like, 'Ooh my God, let's go, Scooby. I love...'And I'd just be like, 'Ah, why? Why?' And then after a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people tell that to you. I needed to let go of all my BS and all the feelings that I had towards Warner Brothers.
"And so then I embraced that a lot more. In the last ten or twelve years, I've really learned to appreciate it and what it did for multiple generations."
