Gabrielle Union revealed that more footage of the East Compton Clovers was shot for Bring It On just to trick audiences.
Union posted a TikTok alerting people to the fact that parts of the film’s trailer were shot specifically for the trailer alone. “Story time! So we shot these snippets that you see here after the movie wrapped,” she said in the video. “Because once test audiences saw the movie, they wanted more of the Clovers. So we shot these, only for the trailer, not for the movie, to make people think we were in the movie more than we were. The end.”
The post got a ton of engagement:
Wowwwwww pic.twitter.com/5XwyhbvcV9
— Frankie (@frankiesmash2) January 8, 2022
The scenes made prospective viewers think they would see the Clovers during their school day, such as coming up with cheers, training, and more.
But as fans know, none of that footage actually made it into the movie, creating even more mystique around the film that has since become a cult classic and an oft-referenced moment when discussing cultural appropriation and racial double standards in American society.
Union has talked at length about her role in Bring It On in 2021, revealing how she felt like she let her character Isis down by choosing to use respectability politics in her portrayal.
“I realized I need to come to grips and acknowledge where I failed Isis. When I given full control, I made her ‘appropriate,'” she wrote in a Sept. op-ed for The Cut. “You [Isis]…needed to work twice as hard as Torrance [Kirsten Dunst] to go from East Compton to land in the UC System. You needed to be beyond reproach. Not just as a cheerleader, but as a community leader and student. And you had to do all that without sacrificing your Blackness. How was I going to accomplish this for you? I was twenty-six, and I knew all the extra work I had done myself. I wasn’t that far removed from my own journey as a UC student when we shot the film in 1999…Black girls like you thought they couldn’t be less than perfect.”
