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They’re sexy! They’re cute! They’re popular to boot!
Start chanting along with the cheers that pepper the now-classic 2000 teen comedy Bring It On and you might never stop. Or at least you’re going to have “that’s alright, that’s OK, you’re gonna pump our gas someday” in your head for hours.
But what’s more than alright and more than OK, is that it’s Jesse Bradford‘s birthday today (you know you want to chant it)—and because this is a cheerocracy, we have decided that the timing is spot-on to check in with the cast of the sleeper hit about a high school cheerleading squad from a privileged enclave in San Diego, Calif., that learns the true meaning of teamwork after it turns out their former captain was stealing routines from other squads.
As Kirsten Dunst, who did some cheering herself in eighth grade, pointed out to E! News almost 20 years ago, the important objective she feels they achieved with the film was to push against the stereotype of the ditzy cheerleader (Eliza Dushku‘s Missy certainly has her preconceived notions) and show how hard those athletes really work.
“They’re gymnasts and dancers, this is like a sport and no one really realizes it,” Dunst explained.
“The kind of cheerleaders that we’re portraying in the film,” added Gabrielle Union, “it’s on such another level as far as the athleticism and the level of commitment.”
Don’t worry, there’s no need for you to attempt to execute a wolf wall pyramid—all that tumbling around isn’t suitable for social distancing at the moment anyway.
Rather, sit back, relax, and enjoy the nostalgic scent of clover in the atmosphere:
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Kirsten Dunst
Torrance Shipman’s dream came true when she was named Big Red’s successor as cheer captain—and it was up to Tor to reunite her squad in time for Nationals when the pyramid threatened to come crashing down around them.
Dunst, meanwhile, started off as a child star in the likes of Interview With the Vampire and Little Women and has remained a prolific actress, starring in (to name a few) The Virgin Suicides, the Spider-Man trilogy, Marie Antoinette, Melancholia, Midnight Special and The Beguiled More recently she’s been tearing it up with the dark humor on TV, earning Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for Fargo and another Globe nomination in 2020 for On Becoming a God in Central Florida.
On May 3, 2018, she welcomed her first child, son Ennis, with Fargo co-star turned real-life love Jesse Plemons.
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Eliza Dushku
New girl Missy appears to be 100 percent attitude (decorated with felt-tip barbed wire), but after learning that cheerleaders aren’t all bobbleheads, she wants to win for the Toros as much as anybody.
Before Bring It On, Dushku was best known for playing five-by-five Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (before which she played Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s daughter in True Lies), and then went on to star in her own short-lived spy drama, Dollhouse, and the supernatural crime series Tru Calling, playing a medical student who can talk to the dead, which turns out to be an ideal tool for solving murders. She’s done a ton of voice work (Torchwood: Web of Lies, Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H.) and most recently appeared in the CBS series Bull and The Saint, a pilot for a new show based on the 1960s TV series that ultimately went straight to VOD.
Dushku married businessman Peter Palandjian in August 2018 and they welcomed a son, Bourne, in 2019. In other good news, Dushku just celebrated her graduation from college in May 2020 (online, like the rest of the Class of 2020) and plans to enter a Master’s program in Holistic Counseling, Psychology, Theory & Practice.
“This has been a dream (as many of you know!) for a long, LONG time coming,” she wrote on Instagram. “I moved back to Boston almost 5 years ago with a few credits under my belt & some fierce determination to complete my BA. Along the way I met the love of my life (Peter P!) who has rooted me on endlessly, with my beautiful family (hi mom, Aaron, Leni, Ben, Nate, Ami! + study nights with my niece & nephews Kyle, Sof, & Joji were true highlights!) & friends (too many to name but I SEE YOU!!) believing in me, our perfect little nugget, Bourne, joining me in my belly for the last few semesters.”
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Jesse Bradford
He believed in her! Missy’s brother, Cliff, does too-cool-for-school things like read The Naked Ape during football games, but he’s drawn to sunny, spirited Tor all the same.
Bradford, who also started acting as a kid, went on to star in the teen stalker thriller Swim Fan and the sci-fi action flick Clockstoppers in 2002; had a memorable turn as Josh Lyman’s intern Ryan in The West Wing; and played a reluctant war hero in Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers. He’s been in a dozen indie films and recent TV appearances include NCIS, Shooter and Magnum P.I. Along the way, back in 2005, he was part of an investment group that included Chris Noth, Damon Dash and Petra Nemcova that opened the New York City nightclub NA—and Eliza Dushku celebrated a birthday there!
Bradford married wife Andrea Watrouse (his actual last name) in 2018.
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Gabrielle Union
We all know that Union hasn’t changed a bit since playing rival cheerleader Isis and her East Compton Clovers cheer outfit remains in the family.
The ageless actress has been in a slew of movies since, among them The Brothers, Deliver Us From Eva, Bad Boys II, The Perfect Holiday, Cadillac Records, Think Like a Man, Top Five, Birth of a Nation, Girls Trip and Breaking In. She won an NAACP Image Award for her role as a driven journalist in the BET series Being Mary Jane and now plays an LAPD detective (who is her same character from Bad Boys II) in Spectrum Originals’ LA’s Finest.
Union spent a season as a judge on America’s Got Talent and upon her exit from the show alleged there was a “toxic culture” on set and she was subjected to racist and sexist remarks. However, an independent investigation determined that “no one associated with the show made any insensitive or derogatory remarks about Ms. Union’s appearance,” NBC and AGT producers shared on May 27, 2020.
“At the end of all this, my goal is real change—and not just on this show but for the larger parent company. It starts from the top down,” Union told Variety before the investigation results were released. “My goal is to create the happiest, most high-functioning, inclusive, protected and healthy example of a workplace.”
Union married now-retired NBA star Dwyane Wade in 2014 after almost six years of dating. They welcomed daughter Kaavia James via surrogate in 2018 and she is also stepmom to Wade’s three kids from previous relationships.
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Clare Kramer
Courtney doesn’t wear anything under her cheer pants, so… there’s that.
Right after Bring It On, Kramer dove into the role of Gloria, the biggest bad Sunnydale had been threatened with to date, in the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She was in the 2002 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction as well as a slew of horror films and supernatural TV series, which included a guest appearance on Eliza Dushku’s show Tru Calling.
She cofounded the website Geeknation because, as she said in an interview with GEEKisH at Oz Comic-Con in 2018, she’s a fan like everybody else. She also hosted the podcast Take Five With Clare Kramer, which she called a highlight of the journey, and segued into hosting and moderating at fan-driven events while continuing to act, most recently in the Lifetime Movie Dating to Kill.
Kramer married producer Brian Keathley in 2005 and they have four children. A fangirl through and through, she refers to herself as a “Mother of Dragons” on her Instagram bio.
“We had the best time filming that movie,” she said about Bring It On, telling GEEKisH, “When I first read the script I didn’t totally understand it because a lot of it was written in this cheer lingo…but I definitely wanted to be a part of it.” Eight auditions later, she got the part and reported for cheer boot camp.
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Nicole Bilderback
Five years after her movie debut in Clueless as Summer, Bilderback played bitchy but ultimately harmless Whitney, who eventually proves to be a team player.
Bring It On was her biggest movie but she has steadily worked in film and TV, including a recurring role as Heather on Dawson’s Creek, followed by House, Heroes, Cold Case, Numb3rs, Castle, The Mentalist, Bones, NCIS: New Orleans and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. An expert in martial arts as well as a trained dancer, Bilderback has done all of her own stunts through the years.
Jenny Han, author of the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before books, wrote in a 2018 New York Times essay that she feels that, if Bilderback were coming up now, she’d be the lead in more projects. “She’d be the star of a teen movie, because I would make it my mission to write one for her,” Han wrote.
Bilderback, who is Korean-American, told Huffington Post in 2018, “The majority of the roles that I’ve portrayed have been roles that were either intended for Caucasian actresses or the ethnicity wasn’t specified. So for me, I got lucky in the sense of I wasn’t really typecast as just an Asian actress. And I think a lot of that had to do with the timing. I was one of the first. It was like me, Lucy Liu, Lindsay Price and one or two other actresses who are still working today.”
Asked what it was like continuing to audition at that point in her career, Bilderback (who read for Crazy Rich Asians but didn’t get it) replied, “I’ve always been very fortunate. I’ve always worked. But it’s, for me personally, getting to the next level that I thought I would have already been at by now.
“Because I’ve always been a contender. I was always getting down to the wire, and politics have been a speed bump. Here I would be a contender for a lead role in something, whether it be a TV show or a great role in a big movie, and there would already be an offer out to a star name, or they went with a different ethnicity. And then it’s funny, because this year has been a really beautiful, big breakthrough year for me because I returned to writing. I wrote a half-hour, single-camera sitcom pilot, kind of loosely about my life, really. I’m also producing now. I’m producing my first feature film. I had to realize, ‘Oh, wait a minute, there’s than one way of becoming a successful actress and reaching the success that I’ve always known I was meant to reach, other than just through auditioning.”
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Natina Reed
Isis’ fiery friend and squad mate Jenelope didn’t hold back, leaving diplomacy to her captain.
Reed was a songwriter and member of the trio Blaque, whose second album, Blaque Out!, came out in 2001. She appeared in the show V.I.P. and the Jessica Alba movie Honey (Blaque’s “I’m Good” was on the soundtrack) before she decided to focus solely on music. Blaque broke up in the mid-’00s but briefly reunited in 2010.
She had a son, Tren, in 2002 with rapper Kurupt and “she was tremendously excited to be a mother,” her father, the Rev. Paul Reed, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “Tren was her priority from that point on.”
Sadly, Reed died in October 2012 when she was hit by a car while walking along Lawrenceville Highway, north of Lilburn, Ga. She was 32.
“The very last time we were together, we were all in the studio,” Brandi Williams, Reed’s mate in Blaque along with Shamari DeVoe, told You Know I Got Soul in 2013. “It was so interesting because of course, we didn’t know that would be the last time we were together. It just felt so natural like we hadn’t been away from each other. It felt like we had been each other everyday up until that day. Shamari was going to school, I was doing my own thing and Natina was jogging on with the Blaque train going as well as her personal thing, so we weren’t really together everyday. When we got in that studio that very last time, it felt like we had never left each other’s side.”
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Lindsay Sloane
Big Red left the Toros high and dry when she graduated and it was soon revealed that she had been ripping off the East Compton Clovers and other cheer squads for who knows how long. Villain!
Sloane has been doing movies and TV ever since, appearing in films such as She’s Out of My League, The Other Guys and the two Horrible Bosses films, as well as shows ranging from The West Wing and Entourage to How I Met Your Mother, Weeds and Psych, Kroll Show and Drunk History.
She’s been married to talent agent Dar Rollins since 2004 and they have two daughters together, Maxwell and Pippa.
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Ian Roberts
Oh, Sparky Polastri, the charlatan expert on the difference between jazz hands and spirit fingers.
Roberts is a founding member of legendary improv troupe Upright Citizens Brigade whose talents have been put to good use in Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Reno 911!, Step Brothers, Workaholics, Key & Peele, Drunk History and wherever else antics are sold.
He has two children, Declan and Josie, with wife Katie.
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Shamari Fears
East Compton Clover Lava also had Isis’ back no matter what.
Fears was also a member of Blaque with Natina Reed and Brandi Williams. She’s been married to Ronnie DeVoe of Bell Biv DeVoe and New Edition fame since 2005 and they welcomed twin sons, Roman and Ronald, in 2017.
In 2018 Fears joined the cast of The Real Housewives of Atlanta and appeared in season 11.
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Richard Hillman
Tor’s smarmy boyfriend Aaron started cheating on her seemingly the second he moved away to college, but she at least got the chance to put him in his place.
With previous credits including Detroit Rock City and Boys and Girls, after Bring It On Hillman had a bit part in Legally Blonde and guest-starred on the TV show Jack & Jill, but he appeared to leave the business behind in 2002 after a decade-long career. He died in 2009 at the age of 34; the cause was not reported.
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Nathan West
In a getting-to-know-you convo with Missy, Jan declares how super-straight he is by making it known that Courtney doesn’t wear anything under her cheer pants (which she does knowingly, as implied when she gives Jan a pointed look before game time one night). Oh, 2000.
After a handful of more roles in the likes of The Skulls II and Miracle (he played major junior ice hockey in Canada), he left the acting game in 2010 and is now busy raising three kids with wife Chyler Leigh—Lexi, on Grey’s Anatomy. They met at an audition for a WB series called Saving Graces. The show wasn’t meant to be, but they were.
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Huntley Ritter
As far as sexuality goes, Les—as he tells Missy—is “controversial.” Oh, 2000.
Ritter went on to appear in more films, including The Wedding Planner, Wishcraft and We Are Marshall, but stopped acting in around 2007 and went into producing and business, becoming an executive at the Virgin Group and then founding his own interactive ad company, USeek.
“One day, while I was sitting in the doctor’s office awaiting an appointment, I noticed three reading options on the table; Golf Digest, Women’s Health, and Where’s Waldo? I remember thinking, I hadn’t seen Where’s Waldo? since I was a kid, so I picked it up,” he recalled to Forbes in 2019. “What was fascinating is that it now included Starbucks, Holiday Inn and other brands sprinkled throughout the search. I found myself engaged and having fun and it led me to think, “Why are we not making ad content more fun like this?”
Their headquarters are in Whitefish, Mont., which Ritter calls “a great place to raise a family.”
Recalling how he first got interested in being on the other side of the camera, Ritter said, “When I was doing Bring It On in San Diego, I pulled my chair up next to one of the main producers and said, ‘Hey, I really want to be a producer. I’d love to shadow you if that’s OK.’ He jokingly replied, ‘Why? You have the cushiest job in the world. You’re one of the main actors in the movie.’ But after some back and forth, he agreed to let me learn directly from him.”
Not long after, “I moved onto the physical production and agency side of the house at Stafford, which I still have. We started doing short form advertising campaigns and we began working with Comcast sales teams to come up with creative pitches and packages while dabbling with e-com click through technologies. All of this eventually led to the idea for USeek.”
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Peyton Reed
When the Toros are learning the intricacies of Mime as part of their crash course in creativity before Nationals, the mime teaching them the moves is the film’s director, Peyton Reed
Having previously worked in TV, including Mr. Show With Bob and David and “The Love Bug” for Wonderful World of Disney, Bring It On marked his feature movie debut. He has since directed—stop us if you’ve heard of some of these—Down With Love, The Break-Up, Yes Man, Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp. Ant-Man 3 is in the works.
Asked in 2018 if he thought massive spectacle movies like those he was making for the Marvel Cinematic Universe were crowding out the kinds of smaller (albeit still studio) pictures he first made a name for himself with, he thought not.
“I don’t think it any tougher now,” he told Tech Crunch. “Honestly, in some ways it’s a bit easier, because not only studios but people like Netflix are financing comedies and stuff like that. I guess what I’m saying is: It’s always been tough.”
“I was 20 or 21. You see the words Cheer Fever [the movie’s original title], and as a dude I was kinda going, ‘I don’t know, is this for me?'” Bradford, who’s celebrating his 41st birthday, recalled to Entertainment Weekly in 2015. “But then I met Peyton, and it was so clear to me that he was a smart guy and that he had a vision.”
“Let the record state,” he also said, “that I bought that Clash T-shirt off of eBay, because I was worried that somebody was going to try to put me in a reproduction that was too big or whatever… But Cliff is probably the most accurate version of the real me that I’ve ever portrayed on camera.”
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