‘Footloose’ star reveals what ‘sidekick’ Sarah Jessica Parker really was like on set
They were ready to cut loose.
Forty years after the 1984 hit movie lit up theaters, “Footloose” co-star Lori Singer reflected on working with Sarah Jessica Parker and the late Chris Penn.
Directed by Herbert Ross, “Footloose” followed Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon), a Chicago teen who moved to a small town where the local minister (John Lithgow) put a ban on dancing.
Singer starred as Ariel Moore, the minister’s rebellious daughter and Ren’s love interest. Parker — who was only 18 at the time — played Rusty, Ariel’s friend. The late Chris Penn, who died in 2006 at age 40, played Ren’s friend Willard, who was also Rusty’s love interest.
“Chris and I were good friends,” Singer, 66, exclusively told The Post. “We were very close. And Sarah, I just loved from the get-go. She had a spark. She was sweet. She was funny. She grabbed the role of being best friends.”
“She played a sidekick, but I thought Sarah was special from the first minute I met her,” she went on. “You can see it in the film.”
Parker, of course, would go on to become a household name — as has Bacon — as she starred as Carrie Bradshaw on “Sex and the City” for six seasons, from 1998 to 2004. The 58-year-old reprised her role in two movies and is currently back in character in HBO Max’s “And Just Like That…,” which is gearing up for Season 3.
Penn, the younger brother of Sean Penn, was found dead in his Santa Monica apartment on Jan. 24, 2006, at the age of 40. He died from an enlarged heart and the effects of a mix of multiple medications.
The late actor and Bacon had to “rehearse quite a bit” on “Footloose” because “they had to teach them to dance,” Singer explained.
“So that was quite a bit,” she recalled. “And Kevin and I had a few dance scenes, so we got to rehearse that a few times.”
Talking to The Post in 2014, Bacon, now 65, said that he didn’t realized he’d be performing choreographed dance moves.
“The script didn’t really indicate anything,” he said at the time. “It just said, ‘and then they dance,’ and again, ‘and then they dance,’ I thought it was like when you’re in a bar, and you start moving around. I said, ‘I don’t know if you really need a choreographer, because I just like to dance. Why don’t you just let me dance, and turn the camera on?’ ”
“From a dance standpoint, the best scene in the movie is me teaching Chris Penn to dance,” he continued. “There’s an innocence that’s captured there, of just this guy trying to teach this other guy a couple of moves, and I think that’s why the movie was popular — more so than any kind of stand-alone dance or gymnastic moves.”
Singer said that the two on-screen couples went out to dinner “a few times” during production.
“We went up to Park City, to a very nice restaurant, and just all of us had a huge table. It felt like my family. They were really tight, and we didn’t have extra people. We didn’t bring our boyfriends or girlfriends. It was just us. And it felt very real.”
Singer said that the moments of “hanging out” both on-screen and off-screen “blended.”
She gushed: “It didn’t feel like we were filming anything.”
