Kevin Smith has revealed that he and frequent collaborator Jason Mewes, who play stoners Jay and Silent Bob, were offered roles in the 2001 comedy Rat Race. The film, which was heavily inspired by 1963's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, saw six teams of people race from Las Vegas to Silver City, New Mexico, to find $2 million as part of a betting game devised by billionaire Donald Sinclair (John Cleese). Rat Race boasted a star-studded cast including Whoopi Goldberg, Rowan Atkinson, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Jon Lovitz, to name a few, but received mediocre reviews.
Smith is well known for directing and starring in several irreverent comedies with shared plot elements and characters collectively known as the View Askewniverse after his own production company, View Askew. Starting with his shoestring budget cult hit Clerks in 1994, Smith established his trademarks, chief among them the leading longhairs Jay and Silent Bob, who went on to bumble through almost all of his other films. The duo most recently appears in 2019's Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, which follows the same plotline as 2001's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, as the two potheads journey across the US to stop production of a film based on their likenesses.
In the newest episode of Smith's podcast, Fatman Beyond, he digs through his old filing cabinets and rediscovers the offer to star in Rat Race. Smith and Mewes would have played brothers Blaine and Duane Cody, which eventually went to Seth Green and Vince Vieluf. The two doofuses stumble into bizarre circumstances throughout the film, and as one of them is mostly unintelligible, it seems as though the roles may just have been written with Jay and Silent Bob in mind. Smith said that he never actually saw Rat Race, as it was released the same day as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
Fatman Beyond's latest episode contains quite a few bombshells for the Smith devotee. It seems everyone wanted to partner with him in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Smith reveals that Warner Bros. asked him to write a Superman film back in 1996 that would have seen the Man of Steel lose his powers and have to use a high-tech suit to save the world from the villain Brainiac. He was later asked in 2000 to develop Joe Simon's The Fly comic book into a movie starring Chris Rock. Unfortunately for his endless suitors, Jay only teams up with Silent Bob.
Smith has certainly gained a reputation for doing his own thing, seeing the industry his own askew way. Twenty-five years after the release of Mallrats, Smith is working on a sequel that will reunite the original cast, including Ben Affleck. As Kevin Smith continues to expand his sprawling and hilarious cinematic askewniverse, it's anyone's guess what groundbreaking offers are being filed away, only to be revealed to the public years after the fact.
Source: ComicBook.com