As the film turns 15 years old, ET looks back on the making of the 2000 drama that had everyone dancing on the bar.
While there’s more to Coyote
Ugly -- the 2000 rom-com starring Piper Perabo, Maria Bello, and Tyra Banks
-- than dancing on the bar and getting doused in water, back when ET visited
the set, it was all anyone could talk about.
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“We went to one of the bars in New York a couple of months
ago where they it's sort of like [the real-life bar] Coyote Ugly where they do
this sort of thing,” Bello explained to ET. “And the girls did this dance
called the ‘water dance’ and it was hilarious because here they were pouring
water on top of each other and really kind of sexy and wild to this great music…
So they brought a dance similar to that into the movie.”
Oh, they sure did! Perabo, the film’s budding star, was at
the center of all the raining water in the film.
Despite all the bar-dancing, both Perabo and Banks had Coyote Ugly’s larger themes in mind.
“Since women run the bar, they encourage other women to get
up on the bar and it's definitely deals with issues of empowerment,” Perabo
said on set. “We can and we will dance on the bar.”
Perabo's character, Violet Stanford, was the newest bartender, trying to earn her place among the coyotes -- Cammie (Izabella Miko), Rachel (Bridget Moynahan), and Lil (Bello) -- and carve out her place in New York City as a successful songwriter.
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“The movie is about dreams,” Banks adds. The model turned
actress played Zoe, an aspiring lawyer who worked at Coyote to pay her way
through school. “It's about seeing a dream and knowing that can't always see
the dream and reach out and conquer it. There's little baby steps that you have
to take to get to where you want, where you want to be.”