It’s been ten years since the box office hit Wog Boy unleashed on the nation, and now Steve and Frank are back with the anticipated sequel, an island full of ethnic skewed laughs in The Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2.
The sequel follows Steve all the way to the Greek island of Mykonos where he travels with Frank to cash in on a lucrative family inheritance. The pair realise it’s not as straight forward as it seemed and soon discover the real meaning of ‘Greek-onomics.’
Old favourites step to the background to make way for a string of equally hilarious new ‘wogs.’
Of course there’s a love story in there too and more of that choreographed nightclub dancing we love, with an all new level of Euro trash.
I meet with Nick Giannopoulos on a chilly Canberra Tuesday at Limelight Cinemas in Tuggeranong. He’s here in promotion of the sequel and to officially open the Canberra premiere this evening.
Having flown in just hours before, Nick’s still energetic and looks every bit the way I’d imagined. I’m expecting a wog boy, but I get a talented and intelligent writer, actor and all-round funny man.
How different is the sequel to the first?
It’s a very different film 10 years on. The guys go to Europe for the first time and straight away they’re fishes out of water. It’s very much based on my own experiences overseas. I went over there with my dad when I was a teenager and my cousins started calling me kangarootha, which means kangaroo in Greek – actually I don’t think it’s a real word, they probably just made it up! I use that in the film a lot. So here I am being called a wog at school in Melbourne and being called kangarootha in Greece. So it’s like, well where do I fit in?
What was your initial reaction to news of the plummeting Greek economy?
I’ve got a lot of my family over there, so it’s really sad. It’s going to be really tough over the next few years, but we’ll still go as tourists. We’ll still support them. People won’t stop going, Greece will be fine – they’ve been through a lot worse than this, civil wars… they are very resilient people.
Do you wish you filmed this year? You certainly would have saved yourself a few Euros…
I’m glad we did it last year because it’s done, but if we did shoot it this year, it probably would have been good for Greece, because we would be spending money there. It would have also been cheaper for us because the Euro has gone down, but that won’t be for long. If you’re going to go on a holiday, do it quick!
It’s been ten years since Wog Boy. Why wait so long?
Not as long as Sylvester Stallone – he took longer than ten years with Rambo didn’t he? Vince has got this really funny joke, he always says ‘we were waiting for the technology,’ like James Cameron.
So what was it? Writers block?
No, not at all. I’ve actually been working on this non-stop for five years, trying to make it as cohesive as possible and make it the best it can be. It was an ambitious story to tell going over there, and originally it started out as a separate project, just based on my experiences travelling to Mykonos as a tourist, someone Australian with a Greek background. A couple of years ago I said to my co-writer, Chris Anastassiades, ‘I think this would be really great with Steve and Frank, audiences already know them.’ We spent a lot of time re-working the script and blending the characters with the Wog Boy characters.
Why Mykonos? Why not Ios, Santaroni, another picturesque island?
Sure, we could have chosen any island but I go to Mykonos a lot myself, and all the characters in the film, I met in Mykonos. Pierre Luigi is a guy a met in the 90’s who boasted to me about having the record for sleeping with more woman than anyone else. I’ve obviously change the name, but it’s based on truth. I’ve been there many, many times. Things happen and you go, gee that might be really good in a movie one day.
Why, other than her obvious hotness, did you choose Zeta Makrypoulia to play Steve’s love interest, Zoe?
We auditioned lots of women for this role in Athens, and Zeta was recommended to us as someone who has had a lot of success in the last few years with some comedies. After she auditioned we just knew we’d found our Zoe, because she’s an amazing quality about her, she’s a goddess. Greeks love her, she is their Geek goddess.
She is currently hosting the Greek version of Dancing with the Stars and it’s huge, it’s like the number one show in Greece. She’s lovely, so down to earth, she wasn’t a princess and she was really keen to be in the film. She was worried about her English, and in fact so were all the Greeks, they are all so worried about it – I don’t know why, because their English is excellent. Compared to the way I speak Greek, it’s fantastic!
Dimitri, who plays Zimmi, his English is fantastic and I said to him ‘where’d you learn to speak such great English,’ and he says (Greek accent) ‘ooooohh you know, I watch alota movies.’
The Greek ‘white envelope bribe,’ or fakelaki as it’s called, features throughout the script. Have you had any awkward brushes with a fakelaki in Greece?
(Laughs) You bet. It’s based on my own experiences with my dad. We went somewhere and he produced an envelope. I didn’t understand it, and he had to explain the whole process to me, it’s something that I had never seen in Australia, and again, like all the other stuff, I just found it really funny! It’s just one of those cultural differences that I thought would be funny in the film especially to an Aussie boy. I mean, we don’t do that here – it’s illegal. It’s just this backward way of doing things there. I asked my dad ‘is it a bribe?’ and he said, (Greek accent) ‘no, it’s more like a tip’ and I use that in the film. You just have to listen to people and you get a lot of good material. Stuff like that you can’t make up.
How easy is it for you to slip into the role of Steve? Do you need to consciously stand, walk and talk more like a ‘wog?’
I knew a lot of guys like Steve. When I was growing up, in my street, every guy was known by his car. We had Steve with his Valiant, Con with his Ford, Harry with his Monaro. Every guy was known by his car. I always thought that was really funny and it was unique, so I put all of that into Steve. And there was always a best mate, like Frank, who wasn’t necessarily Greek, but some other nationality, and they’d playfully muck around and say, ‘Greeks are better, no Italians are better.’ In fact I remember in the 80’s, they used to wear those T-shirts ‘Italians do it better, Greeks to it better.’ I remember that. It was so funny. Frank is like a lot of my Italian mates I had around me when I was young.
Everyone loves Vince Colosimo. What’s he really like and how did you meet?
I met Vince at the Victorian College for the Arts, in the car park actually. I was in third year and he was in first, and we were the only two students with cars, because we passed our HSC our dads got us cars. Except it wasn’t Vince’s car that day, his was in the garage, and I said ‘why did you bring your dad’s car?’ and he said ‘it’s raining, I don’t take my car out when it’s raining.’ I remember saying ‘you’re such a wog mate, I love it.’
After I graduated I did ‘Wogs out of Work,’ then we did a special edition of show where we invited all these famous wogs like Tina Arena and Vince Collomiso, and we had so much fun working together that night. After that I cast him in Wogorama and we came to Canberra actually, he was fantastic at that. What we did over the years, playing all those characters, we developed a real chemistry, it got to the point where we could finish each others sentences.
Kevin Sorbo cast as Pierre Luigi, the ‘king of Mykonos,’ is a hilarious twist – how hard was it to cast this part, and how did you get Kevin?
He gets the girls very excited when he comes out as well, especially the older ladies. He looks alright for a man that’s 50 years old. That was a really difficult role to cast, because we had to cast someone who looked like he could physically sleep with 43 women a month. So we thought, who better than Hercules? It’s a Herculean feat in itself. He was great, he read the script and he said, (LA accent) ‘I get it man, this is fun! I’m going to have soo much fun.’ And then he came over to Greece and he was an absolute joy.
What’s next?
Definitely more holidays to Mykonos. We’ll see what happens, it took me this long to get out this film, so really – who knows.
The Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2
