CraveOnline: You say it would be really nice to be part of a franchise and recognizable, but I will always – and I hope you take this as a compliment because that’s how I mean it – but I will always see you as Natalie from Step Up 3D.
Sharni Vinson: Oh, really?!
Because I LOVE Step Up 3D. I am not joking. It is one of my very favorite movies.
Oh, thank you so…! That’s amazing. Thank you! That means a lot, actually. No, I don’t take that in the wrong way at all. Oh, that means everything. It was my first ever movie. I had an amazing experience. That’s great.
It’s a wonderful character, you had a lot of great dance moves in it. There’s something I was wondering, and it’s hard to tell as a non-dancer, because I have five left feet, I can’t do anything… But there’s that big move you do at the end, and it’s built up a lot, “Can we pull this move off in the big competition?”
Right.
You’re sort of thrown. What I’m wondering is, in reality was that the hardest move to pull off in the film?
In reality, it was the hardest move that I had to do, yes. It was not, in reality, the hardest move in the movie. [Laughs] Because we had the world’s best dancers doing things I’ve never even seen in my life in that movie. For me, that was the hardest move for me in that movie for a multitude of reasons. One, when I actually shot it, I had broken toes from rehearsing that move in rehearsals. So I only was able to like two or three times, and then I had to sit off the stage and put my in an ice bucket because it would swell too much because both toes were broken. It was very difficult to jump off a trampoline and land like that on your knees when your toes are broken and one wrong move can set you back another toe.
So that was hard for that reason, and also we had these incredible martial arts ninjas that actually flip in front of me as I come through them. So they cross before me in front of me, up in the air doing a flip, and then I come through them, so it was all about timing. So there were a couple of times there when I ran up and went to jump on the trampoline and it wasn’t exactly the perfect timing and we had to bail, because if I was going to jump and hit them we were really going to get smacked in the face pretty bad. It was that timing and the fact that I had broken toes for that one. [Laughs] That’s why it was the hardest move for me.
Is there any chance we’ll see you in another dance movie in the future? Has there been any talk of you showing up in Step Up 5?
Step Up 5 is being shot right now and I’m not involved in the film.
Tragic.
Pardon?
That’s tragic.
[Laughs]
I want to see you in that movie! I want to know what happened to Natalie!
I know! What happened to Natalie?! What I would really love to do because I’m so proud of Step Up 3D and it was such an amazing thing to be able to incorporate my dancing into a film, what I’d like to do now is actually, I sing as well. I come from musical theater, so that’s singing and dancing and acting, and what I would really love to do is a film version of a musical, be it a Chicago, or they’re re-adapting a lot of stage musicals these days. I would really love the opportunity to get to do then, and then I could also show my voice as well.
When you were doing musical theater what was your big role? Was there a favorite?
We were doing shows every weekend and doing different numbers from different shows […] but then what happened to me was my first big musical that I booked, which was Grease, I had to actually pass on and give it up because a week later I booked my role in “Home and Away,” and I wasn’t able to do both. So it’s kind of like, again, this huge thing that hasn’t been fulfilled in me yet. It’s that stage thing, when I gave up dancing to start “Home and Away” I knew that dancing was going to come back somewhere, and it did with Step Up 3D. But I feel like that musical element hasn’t come out yet. I don’t think I’m meant to do an actual Broadway stage show, even though it’s not off the table. I do feel like it’s meant to go into a film. If they re-adapted A Chorus Line… I mean I really hope they don’t because it’s a classic… but there’s too many characters in there that I would love to play.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
