“Dirty Dancing” star Jennifer Gray (62) has revealed new things about the cast of the planned sequel to the dance classic. She told Extra that her own character, Frances “Baby” Houseman, will be “a few years older.” Unless, “there’s a lot of CGI,” the actress joked. “You will also see other characters from the original,” announced the 62-year-old. But she didn’t give any specific names. In the first part in 1987, Cynthia Rhodes (66) as Penny Johnson and Jane Brucker (64) as Lisa Houseman appeared alongside Grey.
The old setting – a fictional resort in the Catskills called Kellerman’s – will also play a role again. “It will be about Kellerman’s. There will be music,” said the 62-year-old. In the original 1987 film, she played a teenage girl from the 1960s who vacations there with her parents and falls in love with dance teacher Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze). Swayze died in 2009 at the age of 57 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
The role of the deceased should not be re-cast. “What happened happened, and it will never happen again,” Gray said of the original film in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. “There will never be another Johnny. There will never be another Patrick. This sequel has to be a stand alone work. That’s very tricky,” she explained. But she was already able to give a more precise timetable.
“There’s a script, we’re working on it. We’re going to shoot the film in spring 2023 and it’s coming out on February 9, 2024,” says the actress. Jonathan Levine (46, “Warm Bodies”) will direct the new “Dirty Dancing”. In the original Emile Ardolino was responsible, but he died in 1993 at the age of only 50 as a result of AIDS.
The iconic songs from the original will live on – at least in part – in the sequel. Director Levine told “Deadline” in an interview that the sequel will feature songs from the original alongside ’90s hip-hop. So it’s hard to imagine that “Time Of My Life”, “Hungry Eyes” and of course the ballad “She’s Like The Wind” sung by Swayze have to be omitted.
