Following her parents’ divorce, Haley not only walked away from gymnastics, but also from her family, barely communicating with her father and barely seeing her mother. She fills that void with her best buds Poot and Frank, a couple of dirt bike-riding dudes from Plano, who offer up encouragement and a dare or two. And when they eventually track Haley to VGA (with a truly lame attempt to bust her out), their friendship with her and their appearance in front of a gym full of myopically focused young girls—well, Haley is considered all the cooler because she knows boys.
“Poot and Frank are my favorite characters in the movie,” Jessica Bendinger freely admits. “The opening scene was the first thing I wrote and it remained unchanged from the moment I wrote it. They’re just video game-loving, dirt bike-riding, 100 percent pure dirt bags. They don’t wash their hair. They wear dirty clothes, they probably stink a little bit, but they’re super cute, super funny and super sassy. Those were always the boys that I loved and had crushes on in high school and college, so I wanted to write my perfect dirt bag.”
“Poot and Frank are always there for Haley,” says John Patrick Amedori, a young actor best known for dramatic roles on various television series and in films such as “The Butterfly Effect.” “Whenever she’s in the dumps, we show up and make sure she feels good, usually by turning everything bad that happens into a joke.”
For Amedori, the role of Poot provided some welcome comic relief. “I had a blast, because Poot and Frank don’t really take anything seriously,” he says. “Poot’s quick on thinking up funny, stupid things to say…but they’re actually not funny, they’re just stupid. So when they find out that Haley has the gymnastics thing going on and that she takes it seriously, it’s something they’re not used to. But they just try to lift her spirits.”
Frank is played by Kellan Lutz, a young actor recently seen on the HBO series “The Comeback,” starring Lisa Kudrow. “Frank is kind of ‘out there,’” says Lutz. “He just loves to dirt bike, loves to ride. He has a tattoo—‘Live to Ride, Ride to Live.’”
Lutz explains that Haley hooked up with Poot and Frank as an escape from all her problems in gymnastics. “She decided to pick up a dirt bike and join us to get away from all the drama over there. But being the little punks that we are, we got her into even more problems, leading to the reason she gets sent back to the gymnastics academy. She pays the price for all three.”
Lutz says he had a great time on set and working with Amedori. “It was all about having fun,” he says. “John’s a real cool guy. We have a lot of interests together, so we’d just chill on set. There’s a lot of connection so far as developing our characters together, so I could pull a lot of stuff out of him, a lot of energy, and I’m sure he can say the same about me.”
Best known for his memorable role as Uncle Rico in the indie comedy smash “Napoleon Dynamite,” Jon Gries plays Brice Graham, Haley’s father, a Texas real estate developer and single dad who tries his best to raise his wild daughter. Gries explains, “Haley gets into trouble a lot and it seems that she’s going to end up in jail. The judge asks her to choose between a military academy and a gymnastics school. She chooses the military academy, which shows how much she has grown to hate gymnastics. But Brice bribes people to set it up so she’ll get back into gymnastics because he thinks it may be her salvation.”
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