Before Bill and Ted, and long before The Dude from The Big Lebowski, There was Jeff Spicoli. The gnarly surfer guy from Ridgemont High. The role was of course played by Sean Penn, and many movie fans, myself included still hold it as their favorite role by the actor.

The story goes that Penn didn’t do so well on his audition for the part. However, writer Cameron Crowe claims that Penn was what saved the film. Penn appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and confirmed that he did not have the best audition for Spicoli. You can check out what he had to say below about the mindset he had going into the audition.

“The way I remember it was that I – long before I had a penny in my pocket – had a kind of feeling of entitlement as an actor, not because I thought I was so good, but because I thought that the rest were not so good. And that gave me an awful lot of confidence.”

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More from Penn:

“But I auditioned – terribly. So they dismissed me and I left.”

Then Don Phillips, a casting director on the film changed everything as Penn explains below.

“Don Phillips came running into the parking lot where my broken down Mazda I borrowed was sitting and I was just about to leave. And he said, ‘Get back in here and audition your ass off,’ something like that. He says, ‘You’re not going anywhere.'”

As they say, the rest is history as Penn did much better with his mulligan and the film gave the actor a shot and it paid off for everyone.

Jeff Spicoli is very much iconic in his own way, at least to those who grew up in the 80s. The character’s lines are still quoted to this day, often by me, much to the bewilderment of people around me. Yes, Sean Penn’s performance as Spicoli can be credited for saving the film, however, the film itself is a classic in its own right.

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Source: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (via MovieWeb)

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