Nick Fury

13 March 2014 | 11:48 am | Guy Davis

"There’s a look you’re given by thinner people – it’s almost as if they’re a bit sorry for you."

Nick Frost likes to dance. And he's good at it when he does. But Nick – like many men, perhaps – doesn't like feeling obliged to dance. “If you leave me alone and drip-feed me drinks throughout the evening, I will get closer and closer to the dancefloor until I just have to dance,” says the star of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End. “But if you expect it, I'm not going to want to do it.”

The fact that Frost is, in his words, “a bigger man” only adds to the dance dilemma. “There's a look you're given by thinner people – it's almost as if they're a bit sorry for you,” he says. “'You go for it, big guy!' It's so awfully patronising it would make you not want to dance.”

But Frost did want to dance. What's more, he wanted to dance onscreen. And for the last few years, an idea for a movie had taken up residence in his brain and wouldn't budge. “Every now and then after I'd had a few beers it would knock on my psyche and say 'Hey, why don't you tell someone?'” he laughs. “And I'd tell it to be quiet. But I think I was like a serial killer who wanted to get caught. And one night that voice got so loud I wrote an email to my friend and producer Nira Park, and when I woke up the next morning a little the worse for wear there was a reply: 'This is a great idea. Let's do it'.”

His idea for “a big, bright, beautiful, passionate dance film” is now sashaying into cinemas as Cuban Fury, a romantic comedy starring Frost as Bruce, a salsa-dancing prodigy in his youth who turned his back on his passion. Years later, Bruce is a middle-aged saddo until he catches sight of his fetching new boss, Julia (Rashida Jones), who has a liking for salsa. Inspired to dust off his dancing shoes, Bruce has to wrestle with his own insecurities, while competing with a co-worker (Chris O'Dowd) for Julia's attention.

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Wooing and winning the heart of Julia is a noble goal, but Frost sees Bruce regaining his self-respect as the real achievement of Cuban Fury's central character. “The film is about him rediscovering the man he once was or could have been,” he says. “It's not about him bettering himself for a woman, which a lot of romantic comedies depict well. But what happens then? What if it doesn't work out between them? He's back to square one. What we've tried to do is make him a better man for himself, and in doing so he might win the girl. Even if he doesn't, it doesn't matter.”

While he was no slouch as a dancer beforehand, it took seven months of salsa lessons – “seven hours a day, five days a week” – for Frost to get into Cuban Fury form. And he's justifiably proud of the outcome. “It seems ridiculous looking back that I would put that much effort into a romantic comedy but when you see Bruce dancing that is Bruce dancing. That's me dancing.”