Comic book store owner, NFT developer, and full-time podcaster Kevin Smith has also been known to occasionally dabble in directing movies, as well as building a personality around his strict dedication to the movies and television popular in his adolescence. He came close to combining these hobbies when he almost directed a spinoff film of the Canadian Degrassi high school franchise, which was to have starred popular hip hop artist Aubrey Graham, better known as Drake.
This wouldn’t have been Smith’s first affiliation with the long-running show for teenagers, as he and longtime acting partner Jason Mewes played themselves in cameos several times. In the series, Smith and Mewes are at Degrassi using the school as a backdrop for a fictional Kevin Smith movie, Jay & Silent Bob Go Canadian, Eh?, centered around the duo’s low-level drug dealer characters.
According to an exclusive interview with Screen Rant, Smith received a copy of the script of Degrassi: The Movie from series co-creator Linda Schuyler, although it failed to go forward. The film would have centered around Graham, then a star of the show, and his character’s recovery from a gunshot wound.
Smith is quoted in Screen Rant saying,
“Oh, alright. A Degrassi movie? This is crazy, but I’ll be honest with you. I had a shot. Linda Schuyler back in the day, [she] and her crew wrote Degrassi: The Movie, and I was going to direct it. A big part of the storyline involved Jimmy, who had been shot the previous season, finally getting up and walking. I have a script in my house of Degrassi: The Movie. And they wound up doing it on the show; a version of it where they traveled cross country and went to Hollywood, and Jay was in it.”
Smith’s next movie will be Clerks III, to be released September 13th. It’s a decades-late sequel to Clerks, the film that launched his film hobby.
