Chloë Grace Moretz & Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Kick-Ass

Kick-Ass traces the adventures of a geeky high schooler who develops a superhero altar ego in order to combat the evils that plague every adolescent, before descending into the dark and truly evil underworld of local crime syndicates and drug-peddling. Stephen Schaefer speaks first with Christopher Mintz-Plasse, whose film debut as McLovin in Superbad has reached nearly iconic status in the canon of cinematic nerdhood. Mintz-Plasse changes gears here as a gangster’s son eager for dad’s approval. Then comes Chloë Grace Moretz, now 13 but 11 during filming, whose performance as vigilante crime-fighter Hit-Girl has been swept up into a swirl of controversy about the appropriateness of a child actor using crude adult slang and being extremely violent. Comparisons to Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver and Natalie Portman in The Professional are inevitable. So is the eminence of Moretz’s career: she just completed the American remake of Swedish vampire sensation Let the Right One In and is signed to star in Martin Scorsese’s next movie (31 minutes).

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