‘It was hard to hit me in the face with the steak’ – Jon Hed­er on 20 years of Napoleon Dynamite

Actors can go entire careers with­out cre­at­ing char­ac­ters that with­stand the test of time but what hap­pens when they achieve that goal straight off the bat? That’s what hap­pened to Jon Hed­er, star of Jarred Hess’s 2004 word-of-mouth megahit Napoleon Dyna­mite. Turn­ing 20 this week, Heder’s whol­ly orig­i­nal por­tray­al of a high school odd­ball with a tight blonde ​‘fro, scuffed Moon Boots and slick dance skills was so instant­ly mem­o­rable, his life – and our rela­tion­ship with Jamiro­quai ear­worm ​‘Canned Heat’ – were nev­er quite the same again.

“It was the first movie I ever made and we didn’t even know that it would nec­es­sar­i­ly be seen by any­one,” says Hed­er of Hess’s scrap­py first film. Thank­ful­ly they were way off the mark: ​“Word of mouth got around and we soon start­ed real­is­ing that peo­ple were lov­ing it,” he adds, remem­ber­ing its sur­prise suc­cess. ​“Sud­den­ly, I had this huge oppor­tu­ni­ty. I didn’t want to pass it up but I also realised there’s a good chance I’m going to be remem­bered for Napoleon for the rest of my life.”

Hed­er and Hess first met as film stu­dents in 2002 and quick­ly found they had a shared sense of humour and a fas­ci­na­tion with small-town obscu­ri­ties. Not long after, they made Pelu­ca, Hess’s stu­dent short in which Hed­er played Seth, an over­ly-con­fi­dent nerd who would even­tu­al­ly become Napoleon Dynamite.

“[Jared] just said ​‘Hey, do you want to make this short with me?’ and I was like ​‘Let’s do it,’” says Hed­er, who at that point had zero act­ing expe­ri­ence. ​“It helped us estab­lish the pac­ing, cadence, sound and look of Napoleon and every­thing about him. It wasn’t until after the short that [Hess] said ​‘I’m think­ing of mak­ing a movie based on this char­ac­ter, what do you think?’” Unde­terred by the pres­sure of car­ry­ing an entire fea­ture film, Hed­er wast­ed no time sign­ing up: ​“I was like ​‘Yes. I’m total­ly game.’”

Crib­bing from real things they’d expe­ri­enced in small-town Ida­ho, Hess and his wife Jerusha wrote a sto­ry unlike any oth­er high-school movie. Hed­er played its epony­mous star, a teenage out­sider who lives with his grand­ma (Sandy Mar­tin), dwee­by broth­er Kip (Aaron Ruell) and Tina the lla­ma in the mid­dle of nowhere.

Despite fre­quent­ly brag­ging about his sick bō staff skills and abil­i­ty to catch deli­cious bass, Napoleon strug­gles through high school, with his life made worse fol­low­ing the arrival of his sleazy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries). How­ev­er, when his new best friend Pedro (Efren Ramirez) decides to run for class pres­i­dent, Napoleon spies a way to sup­port his pal while show­ing the pop­u­lar kids exact­ly what he’s made of.

“We both had a very clear idea of the world, who this char­ac­ter is and what he’s about,” says Hed­er on build­ing the film’s off-beat vibe and Napoleon’s thrift-store aes­thet­ic. ​“Jared pulled so much inspi­ra­tion from him­self and his younger broth­ers and when I read [the script], I was like ​‘Oh, there’s stuff about me and my younger broth­ers here too,’” he says of Napoleon’s dis­tinct­ly insu­lar awk­ward­ness. ​“There was also a lone­li­ness to the char­ac­ter, some­thing that made him a bit of a lone wolf. He’s a one-man band who march­es to the beat of his own drum.”

With high school hits like Amer­i­can Pie and Old School still very much in the rear-view mir­ror, Hed­er was con­vinced that pop cul­ture need­ed Napoleon at that par­tic­u­lar moment. He wasn’t even put off by his strange dia­logue and monot­o­ne line deliv­ery. ​“While it was weird, it all made sense,” he tells us. ​“The way he brags and push­es the truth to look cool and gain accep­tance but in an inno­cent way… it was time for this char­ac­ter to be on screen so I was 100% in,” smiles Hed­er. ​“I was going to get a perm, wear the Moon Boots and ful­ly com­mit. I wasn’t going to hold any­thing back.”

And he didn’t. Heav­i­ly quotable dia­logue aside, Napoleon Dyna­mite fea­tures plen­ty of mem­o­rable moments and strong visu­al gags. Hed­er put his head through three perms to secure the right look (“My hair had so many chem­i­cals in it, it was almost about to fall out,” he admits) and even did his own stunts – includ­ing being on the receiv­ing end of a steak to the face.

“It was hard to hit me in the face with the steak,” says Hed­er of the scene where an angry Uncle Rico whips a cut­let at an unsus­pect­ing Napoleon. ​“Jared want­ed it to look as good as it could and [Gries] was the one who was actu­al­ly throw­ing it, which speaks to the nature of inde­pen­dent film­mak­ing,” he adds. ​“Typ­i­cal­ly, you’d have some­one else throw­ing a fake steak.”

After fail­ing a num­ber of times, a deter­mined Gries made a small change and final­ly secured the per­fect shot: ​“He switched to an even big­ger steak, some­thing with girth that he could real­ly aim and throw,” reveals Hed­er. ​“His first take nailed me and it hurt. It ripped my glass­es off but inside I was think­ing ​‘That’s the shot.’”

Mean­while, oth­er scenes spoke to the char­ac­ters’ deter­mi­na­tion to escape their small-town lives, like Napoleon’s unfor­tu­nate expe­ri­ence with Uncle Rico’s inter­net-bought ​‘time machine.’ ​“That was based on a true sto­ry that hap­pened to Aaron Ruell’s younger broth­er,” says Hed­er, reveal­ing how Kip’s real-life sib­ling inspired the scene where a fake time machine elec­tro­cutes Napoleon. ​“That scene or the scenes on the chick­en farm – you just know they’re based on real things. They’re weird but I love how they added to the crazi­ness of how these char­ac­ters actu­al­ly believed this might work,” he laughs. ​“Napoleon, Kip and Rico espe­cial­ly are all des­per­ate to get out of these lives.”

Of course, this weird­ness cul­mi­nates with a real show­stop­per when Napoleon helps Pedro land the class pres­i­dent job by bust­ing out his best dance moves to Jamiroquai’s Canned Heat.

“That all came from me,” says Had­er, telling us how Hess wrote the film’s cli­max after hear­ing his star liked to dance. ​“There was pres­sure, for sure. I was like ​‘Should I chore­o­graph it?’ but Jared was like ​‘What do you nor­mal­ly do?’ and I told him I nor­mal­ly just freestyle so he said ​‘Just do that.’ I kicked every­body out,” he con­tin­ues, remem­ber­ing how the sequence was shot. ​“It was just Jared, the cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er and the pro­duc­er. When I was done, it wasn’t like in the movie where sud­den­ly there was rau­cous applause. It was more like: ​‘Did that work?’”

Thank­ful­ly, it did. Nobody saw Napoleon’s impromp­tu dance moves com­ing and they were an instant hit. For Hed­er, it was val­i­da­tion for the under­dog: ​“I can’t think of any­thing more raw than putting your­self out there in front of all these stu­dents he was try­ing so hard to look cool in front of,” he rea­sons. ​“Being as social­ly awk­ward as Napoleon is, danc­ing just felt like the per­fect thing for him to show­case because audi­ences just didn’t know what to expect.”

20 years lat­er, Napoleon Dyna­mite has bond­ed with fans in many unex­pect­ed ways – and Hed­er has heard about them all ​“It’s incred­i­ble that this movie has soared for this long and solid­i­fied its place in pop-cul­ture his­to­ry. I’m now get­ting fans who say they grew up on this film or that it made their sense of humour,” he smiles. ​“Peo­ple have told me how it helped them through dark times and lots of sol­diers sta­tioned in Iraq and Afghanistan told me their unit would watch it on repeat. It’s real­ly cool to think we were with them.”

Mean­while, the jour­ney of cre­at­ing a mem­o­rable per­for­mance straight out of the gate has been just as per­son­al for its star: ​“Cast­ing direc­tors some­times think ​‘Well that’s you, isn’t it? Wasn’t this basi­cal­ly just a doc­u­men­tary?’ It’s always been tough to break that mould,” admits Hed­er of Napoleon’s larg­er-than-life endurance, ​“but I’m very grate­ful for that role. I’m still remem­bered most­ly [for Napoleon] and that’s not such a bad thing because I love that movie,” he smiles. ​“If I’m going to be con­nect­ed to a char­ac­ter or project, it’s a pret­ty good one.”