One of the more surprising moments in Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of Halloween has to be the cameo appearance of the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz. The heavy metaller-turned-movie guy had a personal connection.
“As it turns out, Rob Zombie is a fan of ours,” Dolenz tells Playback’s Jim Ousley. “He got in touch with me through my agent and said, ‘I want you to do a cameo in my film.’ I knew who he was and that he was a fan, but I wasn’t familiar with his work as a writer and director.”
Typically, these sort of calls involve Dolenz reanimating his on-screen persona from the Monkees late-1960s television show. But Dolenz — on tour right now with the Monkees — has far more range, having appeared on TV as early as the late 1950s in Circus Boy. After the Monkees, he did a variety of voiceover work, appeared on TV’s Adam 12,, in films like Night of the Strangler and Linda Lovelace for President, and helped launch a revival of the stage musical Pippin.
In keeping, Dolenz was thrilled to learn that Zombie would be using him as a gun-shop owner who sells Malcolm McDowell’s character a gun as he searches for the maniacal Michael Myers. “When I found out I wasn’t playing myself, I got excited about that,” Dolenz says. “I don’t like playing myself. As it turned out, it’s one of the best little pieces of footage I have that I’ve done.”
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