Brit Will Kemp on 'Step Up 2 the Streets'

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While dance movies have made a comeback in recent years, they haven't always been well regarded critically. That made dancer-turned-actor Will Kemp slightly leery of doing "Step Up 2 the Streets.""I have to be honest, very often when you hear about these kinds of movies, you do think, 'Oh gosh, they're really cheesy,' right?" says Kemp.But "Step Up 2 the Streets," now in theaters, eased his mind. Kemp thinks director Jon M. Chu has made a film that puts the focus on the right elements."It is incredibly relevant," says Kemp. "It's really hip. It has a great soundtrack. So I believe it does plug in to our age, so I think it's very relevant in that way, and in that way he's incredibly smart."Brit Kemp, 30, is the main grown-up in the film, a sequel to the 2006 hit "Step Up." He plays Blake Collins, director of the Maryland School of the Arts, where new student Andie (Briana Evigan) is finding it hard to adapt her street-dancing techniques to classical discipline.Blake is also the elder brother of top student Chase (Robert Hoffman), who wants to compete with Andie and their new dance crew in an underground competition called the Streets.After training at the Royal Ballet School, Kemp joined acclaimed choreographer Matthew Bourne's dance company and toured the world for 12 years, earning a variety of honors.He landed his first acting role in Renny Harlin's "Mindhunters," but it was released after "Van Helsing," in which he co-starred with Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale. He also caught the public's eye with his moves in a Gap jeans commercial.A photograph of Kemp from Bourne's production of "Swan Lake" is prominently displayed in the movie, helping to explain his character's background.Blake "was kind of written for me, which is wonderful," says Kemp by phone from Los Angeles. "It happened pretty quickly also. There was one point we talked about trying to do some more dancing in it, but there was no preparation time, and I hadn't really worked with the choreographers."Plus, the character, it's not really about him. There's a lot that was cut where you learned more about Blake's background and why he's that uptight, and his relationship with his brother was explained quite a lot more, and there's family frictions and all that happening."That, unfortunately, had to go because Jon had to make it just under an hour and a half. It plays like one long MTV dance movie, which is exactly as it should be."Kemp, who's also a fan of classic Hollywood dance films, got a kick out of the story's central premise -- that the kids have gotta dance."Say if that was happening, and that was the worst that kids were up to, that would be fantastic, don't you think?" he says. "It'd be like, 'Mom, I really want to go to the Streets, man. I want to go dancing.' It's like, 'Yeah, you go dancing.'"There's no violence, no knives, no drugs. It'd be fantastic."Plus, it might help turn around America's obesity epidemic."Maybe that's the answer," says Kemp. "Maybe all the kids in L.A. and in fact the whole world should be dancing in the streets. Maybe that's the answer to all our global problems."Kemp is one of a number of British actors putting on American accents in current movie and television projects. His "Mindhunters" co-star, Jonny Lee Miller, stars in the new series "Eli Stone," and he auditioned for a role on "The Sarah Conner Chronicles" opposite Brit Lena Headey but was deemed "too young." He's friends with Matthew Rhys, who stars on "Brothers & Sisters."But Kemp feels no qualms about taking a role written as an American."We've had people like Rene Zellweger, Natalie Portman, Claire Danes and Gwyneth Paltrow coming over to do English characters," he says."Acting is now becoming such a global sort of thing. Projects that are casting out here are usually casting in London and Australia. I think it is a big global industry now, probably more than ever."(Contact Betsy Pickle of The Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee at www.knoxnews.com.)