5. Regina Hall's turn as Candy, the bachelor party stripper who captures Harold Perrineau's heart, like, immediately, marked her feature debut.
"I couldn't dance," Hall recalled her audition during a Q&A at the LA Film Festival in 2018, "...and one of the girls in my acting class, she was a stripper, she said, 'you don't have to do anything...you just have to turn around and slap your ass. They won't know.'"
Before the audition she drank a bottle of Alize, and couldn't figure out why she was still sober. She told her boyfriend to wait in the car, figuring it wouldn't take long because she didn't have much to show off. When she came in, the other girls were practicing choreographed routines.
"All I had was one move!" Hall exclaimed. But she went in, grabbed a chair, turned around, looked behind her and gave her butt a slap, as planned." Producer Sam Kitt had them stop the music and asked her, "'Can you do anything else?' And I said yes and I picked up my jacket and was like, 'Thank you.' And I left!"
She got the role and two days before go-time the choreographer (who managed strippers) warned her that she was going to suck. "She was totally horrible to me," Hall said, "but she was great." The woman had Hall come to her mirror-lined apartment in Brooklyn and told her to pick out an outfit from the array of racks on display and dance till she turned herself on—and then pretend to dance for a cute guy she'd potentially date.