Johnathon Schaech and Ethan Embry don't think “That Thing You Do!” would work today — but they have spinoff ideas

The actors are reuniting onscreen in Schaech's "Blue Ridge: The Series" almost 30 years after playing bandmates in the cult classic film.

Some things are better left in the past, especially when it's a beloved movie like That Thing You Do! And that's coming straight from the film's stars, Johnathan Schaech and Ethan Embry.

Tom Hanks' 1996 directorial debut about the rise and fall of the fictional one-hit-wonder band the Oneders (pronounced "Wonders") in the '60s is a cult classic, but the actors don't think that it should ever be revived for any kind of follow-up because it was a product of the time when it was made.

"I don't know if you can make that movie today, for better or worse," Embry, who played T.B. Player, a.k.a. the Bass Player, tells Entertainment Weekly. "I don't know if you can because it's so light. [It's set in] '64 before the s--- hit the fan, and since then, I've become so aware that the s--- was already flinging out of the fan come '64. We're aware of things so much now that that illusion of lightness, I don't know if you could accurately convey it today."

Related: That Thing You Do! 20th anniversary: The Wonders look back

Embry doesn't think there would even be a reason to revive it today. "Why would you want to?" he says. "Music isn't the same. Culturally, we're not the same. Even something that is light, and fun, and heartwarming like Barbie — I love that movie so much, but it has this undercurrent of shaking the viewer, and there's none of that in That Thing You Do! It's just pure light."

Schaech, who played the band's lead singer and guitarist, Jimmy, thinks there's only one way they could bring it back: "If Tom Hanks wrote it, it would work," he says. He even has an idea for a potential spinoff that would involve both his and Embry's characters. "I keep going back to The Herdsmen," he adds. "Jimmy had a band called The Herdsmen, and I think that T.B. Player probably was part of that."

That gives Embry an idea of his own. "It'd be really funny to see these guys in the '90s," Embry says. "What would they look like now?" But when Schaech points out that Embry's character "went to war" at the end of the movie, Embry reveals he's "not optimistic" about how that turned out for T.B. Player. "I think his best case scenario is he came back to PA and ended up working in the Rust Belt and just got really quiet," Schaech says.

Related: That Thing You Do puts the band back together for coronavirus relief fundraiser

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This all sounds normal in today's era of reboots and revivals, but if you had asked Embry and Schaech back in 1996, they would have thought you were joking. Almost 30 years ago, they couldn't have imagined the kind of love and fandom the sleeper hit film has now.

"When it opened up in the theaters, it wasn't considered a success," Embry says. "It came in, I think, eighth for the weekend, so it wasn't what would be considered a big box office smash. But it's one of those films from the '90s that 10, 15, 20 years after it was made, you realize, 'Wow, this is really popular.' That movie means so much to so many people, but it was a surprise to me."

In fact, the impact of the film didn't hit Embry until recently, when the fictional band got back together in 2017 for a surprise performance of the title track, "That Thing You Do!" at the Roxy Theater in Los Angeles. Three of the four members — Schaech, Embry, and Tom Everett Scott, who played drummer Guy (the missing cast member was Steve Zahn, who played guitarist Lenny) — surprised the crowd with a quick performance of the soundtrack's catchy song and video of the moment went viral. "I didn't really find that out until we did the show at the Roxy how much people absolutely love that film," Embry says. "Because if you look at the metrics, it's not on paper, but as a cultural piece, it means so much to people, which I think is a testament to Hanks."

Schaech says he realized the impact the film had a lot sooner because of how actual boy bands reacted to it. "Donnie Wahlberg said that we could open for him," Schaech says. "And then I talked to the guys from *NSYNC and they were playing it on that tour the year that it was released."

"That's why I got to meet Timberlake," Embry remembers.

Related: That Thing You Do: Flashback to the 1996 Premiere

Once the actors realized, however belatedly, how popular the movie became, they couldn't escape it. "That Thing You Do!" follows them everywhere. "I had a friend of mine just tell me that their daughter's ballet recital is doing 'That Thing You Do!'" says Schaech. "I would love to see it, to be honest. I would love to see what they do with it. One time, I got a text from Steve Zahn, and he was singing it — he heard it in a shopping center, and he was going around singing the song to me. It was great. I still have it on video."

Embry smiles as he responds, "I got arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in Rhode Island when I was shooting Brotherhood, and it was playing in the car on the way to the station." When asked if he's being serious, he laughs. "I'm embellishing a little bit, but it's a great story... What [Adam] Schlesinger wrote, to have that song pumped through so many grocery stores for 25 years and still have people that love that tune, is just a testament to what his songwriting ability was." (Schlesinger, who wrote the That Thing You Do! theme song and earned Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for his work, died from complications of COVID in 2020.)

The music is what brought the cast together in the first place. Schaech and Embry reveal they met for the first time months before filming, began to listen to the fictional band's songs, and then spent eight weeks together learning not only how to play them but also how to play their instruments since most of them were not musicians. "Zahn could play guitar," Schaech says. "And Ethan already knew how to play pretty much everything, but me and Tom Everett Scott had to learn our instruments from scratch, and we did. We all got together like a little band during that time, and that's why we love each other so much, I think."

Embry was 17 at the time of filming and remembers Schaech, who was 25 at the time, acting like his older brother on set. "I was really young, and Johnathon looked out for me," he says. "Which is nothing against the other two dudes, but I never felt that from them. But from you, I always felt like you kind of kept an eye out on me, which was really great. Johnathon kept my feet on the ground."

After acting like brothers on set 30 years ago, the two are making it official by reuniting onscreen in Schaech's Blue Ridge: The Series, which is a continuation of the 2020 Blue Ridge film. Embry guest stars in Sunday's finale (airing 9 p.m. ET/PT on INSP) as an angry army veteran driven to desperate measures to save his home, resulting in him holding Justin's (Schaech) ex-wife (Sarah Lancaster) and daughter (Taegen Burns) hostage at gunpoint in the Blue Ridge police station. And Embry's onscreen father in the episode is played by Schaech's real-life father, adding a new layer to their brotherly bond.

Related: That Thing You Do! stars Tom Hanks and Ethan Embry honor Adam Schlesinger in emotional tributes

Embry thinks fans will be shocked to see him not just as a violent terrorist but also looking "all old and grizzly," and he praises Schaech for still looking as "incredible" as he did 30 years ago. "I don't know how Johnathon does it," he adds. "I'm absolutely jealous."

"You look just as great," Schaech tells him. "You're in great shape, too, buddy."

Schaech reveals that Blue Ridge: The Series showrunner Gary Wheeler was inspired to cast Embry in the role after seeing his "intensity" on display in Showtime's Brotherhood. "I don't want to cry about it, but it was magic to have him back," Schaech says.

"Anytime Johnathon invites me to anything, from a kid's birthday party to working on a set together again for a couple of weeks, I'll jump at the chance," Embry says. "That's the only qualifier that I need, and I will show up."

And once Embry learned more about the role and that he would be playing the villain, he was thrilled. "As dorky as I can often get, there's this other side of that energy that can express itself in many different ways, and I personally enjoy those more intense characters and figuring out where it comes from within them," he says. "You have to find a way to sympathize with this terrorist, and it's an important part of the arc of the episode. So, that work of figuring out how you could get anybody to sympathize with someone who makes those decisions, it was fun work."

Even though he's known and worked with Embry for three decades now, Schaech was impressed by the new side he saw of him on set. "There were situations and scenes that I didn't know how we were going to pull them off, and Ethan pulled it off," he says. "You couldn't take your eyes off him. He was riveting. That Thing You Do! was one of my first films — I had done work before, Ethan had also, but we learned a lot on how to act, how to be on sets, and we learned our craft there. Working with Ethan 30 years later, I got to see this incredible professional nail stuff that I was very concerned about because I really needed someone to take it to a whole different level, and he took it way past anything I could ever imagine."

Filming Blue Ridge: The Series together was a stark contrast to their first time working together on That Thing You Do! — mainly because of the budget. "They had a lot more money on that — not that we saw any of it," Embry says while Schaech laughs. "We were surrounded by it, which really does paint a different experience."

"Yeah, I thought every film was going to be that type of luxury," Schaech agrees. "But ever since then, I've never had that experience again."

They might not be put up in first-class hotels, all expenses paid, anymore like Jimmy and T.B. in their heyday, but reuniting again, they've at least proved they're not one-hit Wonders.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.