Veteran director and choreographer Adam Shankman called in all his favors for his new film Stop! That! Train!<\/i><\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m gonna be perfectly honest, the Joel McHale and Paul Scheer of it all were both things that happened in a day,\u201d Shankman, 61, admitted on Obsessed: The Podcast<\/i><\/a>. \u201cI turned everybody, and I was like, \u2018If we don\u2019t have some dudes in the front of this movie, there\u2019s not gonna be anybody but drag queens for the first almost 10 minutes, which isn\u2019t really what the movie is.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The calls to those two actors went out \u201cthe day before\u201d they shot the scenes. \u201cAnd they just said yes.\u201d<\/p>\n In the film, McHale and Scheer play two of the titular train\u2019s snobby first-class passengers who are forced to cooperate with its stewardesses and President Judy Gagwell, played by RuPaul, to stop the train from barrelling into Los Angeles after its brakes fail from a freak weather event.<\/p>\n \u201cI am so proud of Ru in this movie. We had so much fun,\u201d Shankman said, who met RuPaul in 1994 while choreographing an AIDS benefit.<\/p>\n \u201cRu just completely gave over to it, and I could really see her enjoying it,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt was a great time, and she\u2019s really funny in the movie.\u201d<\/p>\n In the film, RuPaul plays the president of the United States. \/ YouTube\/screengrab<\/p>\n To get so many stars into his film\u2014including RuPaul, Modern Family<\/i>\u2018s Jessie Tyler Ferguson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/i>\u2018s Sarah Michelle Gellar, and The Simple Life<\/i>\u2018s Nicole Richie\u2014Shankman made sure to get them on and off the set as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the fastest one in and out was Paul Scheer and Joel McHale; they were there for probably a half hour each,\u201d he explained, remembering his phone call to the Community <\/i>actor.<\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018I swear to God, Joel, you\u2019re gonna be here for an hour,\u2019\u201d the Hairspray<\/i> director recalled. \u201cAnd he was like, \u2018Yeah, yeah, right. This isn\u2019t my first rodeo.\u201d<\/p>\n After Shankman filmed the Community<\/i> actor\u2019s scenes in just minutes, McHale remarked, \u201cMy God, you weren\u2019t lying.\u201d<\/p>\n For the rest of the actors, Shankman said he shot their scenes in half a day, much more quickly than for a normal film.<\/p>\n Shankman filmed the entire movie\u2014shot largely in a single interior train set piece that he kept redressing\u2014in just 19 days, whereas the average film shoot can last for months.<\/p>\n \u201cWe did this thing so fast… We were shooting like a TV show,\u201d he explained. \u201cEverything required a lot of trust and a lot of like, \u2018OK, this is what we\u2019re going to do. This is how you\u2019re going to do it. We\u2019ve got to go. And if it doesn\u2019t work, we still have to move on.\u2019 There was not a lot of time to think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Adam Shankman called in his return favor for officiating Sarah Michelle Gellar’s wedding to get her into his film. \/ Fred Prouser \/ REUTERS<\/p>\n For some actors, like Gellar, the A Walk To Remember<\/i> director needed for multiple scenes across multiple days. Those, he said, were a tougher sell.<\/p>\n \u201cSarah Michelle was\u2014that was a little harder ask just because instead of being that one day where she\u2019s just shooting her stuff inside the train, I also needed her on the outside of Union Station for that one little piece,\u201c he explained.<\/p>\n Shankman, who got his start choreographing for Whitney Houston and RuPaul, called in all his favors for his new film. \/ Mario Anzuoni \/ REUTERS<\/p>\n Shankman knew he could make the ask, however, as a return of favor for officiating her wedding with Scooby-Doo <\/i>actor Freddie Prinze Jr.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, the marriage is still strong,\u201d he quipped. \u201cSo I\u2019m feeling good. I\u2019m one for one. That is a great source of pride for me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve done some things that are very strange in my life and career that don\u2019t make a lot of sense to me, and that\u2019s one of them,\u201d he said. \u201cThe whole notion of being able to go on and get ordained online for $20 and being able to legally marry people. It\u2019s really crazy, but I\u2019m thrilled that I got to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Stop! That! Train!<\/i> premieres in theaters this Friday, June 12.<\/p>\n Subscribe to our <\/b><\/i>YouTube<\/b><\/i><\/a> channel to watch new episodes of \u2018Obsessed: The Podcast\u2019 every Wednesday and Friday. And <\/b><\/i>follow our feed<\/b><\/i><\/a> to listen to the show the next morning on your <\/b><\/i>favorite podcast platform<\/b><\/i><\/a>.<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Veteran director and choreographer Adam Shankman called in all his favors for his new film Stop! That! Train! \u201cI\u2019m gonna be perfectly honest, the Joel McHale and Paul Scheer of it all were both things that happened in a day,\u201d Shankman, 61, admitted on Obsessed: The Podcast. \u201cI turned everybody, and I was like, \u2018If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2454120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[362404,324984,482306,361472,53992,482307,482308],"class_list":["post-2454119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-adam-shankman","tag-joel-mchale","tag-paul-scheer","tag-rupaul","tag-sarah-michelle-gellar","tag-shankman","tag-veteran-director"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Adam-Shankman-Reveals-How-So-Many-Big-Stars-Ended-Up.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2454119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2454121,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454119\/revisions\/2454121"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2454120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2454119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2454119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2454119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n
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