Echoing comments his American Pie co-star Shannon Elizabeth made last year, Jason Biggs has acknowledged that the raunchy comedy’s controversial webcam scene—in which a school’s worth of dudes watch an oblivious foreign exchange student undress via webcam without her consent, leading to her public shaming and deportation—is really pretty gross.
“It wouldn’t get made now and it couldn’t get made now,” Biggs told BuzzFeed News’ “AM to DM” on Wednesday. “It would be unacceptable what that represents.” He acknowledges, however, that the 1999 film arrived “a full generation ago,” and that nobody thought then to discuss how the scene might be problematic is indicative of how much things have changed.
“[A]t the time,” he said, “I remember reading the script and reading that part and being shocked that there was cameras on computers! That’s what I took away from it originally!”
Last July, Elizabeth talked to Page Six about the scene. “If this had come out after the #MeToo movement, there would definitely be a problem,” she said. “I think that it would have gone down differently.”
Biggs agrees. “People are having these conversations, as they should be,” he said. “Again, the internet has changed everything, but specific to sex and teens, the conversation now is totally different now to what it was 20 plus years ago, so the art that’s made surrounding it needs to be totally different.”
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