Kenan Thompson recalls 'sizing up' his “All That ”costar Kel Mitchell on their first day: 'Are you cool?'
“We telepathically communicated with our eyeballs and chins.”
Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell have been a match made in comedy heaven since day one — they even have the anecdotes to prove it.
In his new memoir, When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice from a Professional Clown, Thompson recalls his very first day on the set of All That where he admits to being intimidated by his new costars. Luckily, there was one kid to whom he felt an instant connection.
“The one other Black guy in the room was Kel Mitchell, who was plucked from a talent search in Chicago,” Thompson wrote. “We nodded at each other, you know, the way ‘we’ do, a quick chin up. Like, ‘All right, I see you, my brother.’ We had an immediate connection but were still kind of sizing each other up from a distance. We telepathically communicated with our eyeballs and chins: ‘Are you cool? Are you not cool?’”
He continued, “When someone’s cool on the Black radar with the head nod and they give it right back to you, that’s perfect. Any deviation from that and it’s a problem. You know we good, and that’s all that needs to be said. Like our grand- parents probably sharecropped, and everything else under the Black encyclopedia umbrella is going to align because the struggle is real. We stick together.”
Tollin/Robbins Productions/courtesy Everett Collection Kel Mitchell and Kenan Thompson
But even with so much boiling down to a single nod, there was still more for Thompson to learn about Mitchell, which came from seeing his fellow child actor perform. As Thompson described it, the pilot episode of All That “unleashed Good Burger on the world” and gave him a chance to see Mitchell in action.
He wrote, “I remember watching him do his thing and thinking, ‘This dude’s a powerhouse,’ ‘cause he just ran with it. I could have easily been jealous of Kel in that moment, but I instinctively understood that there was room for all of us to shine on this show.”
Sure enough, when the duo joined forces, that impulse was proven true. “Kel and I organically clicked for the first time when we performed ‘Mavis & Clavis’ together, playing two old Black men,” Thompson said. “I was from the South Side of Atlanta, and Kel was from the South Side of Chicago, so we’d both witnessed old Black men jawing a million times.”
He added, “Kel and I made each other laugh, and that’s when we really bonded. Then we started talking and realized we had so many eerily similar experiences growing up. We were kind of the same person.”
Arturo Holmes/Getty Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell
In the years since then, the pair have forged a lifelong friendship that most recently saw them reconnect for Good Burger 2. Earlier this week, Thompson revealed that reuniting for the sequel meant rekindling their friendship as well, following a “falling out” that led to them spending a huge chunk of time apart.
“When you have a real friendship, it was five minutes into the phone call, we were back,” he said on Today. “It was like, what were we waiting on all this time? You just never really know until you actually have that talk.”
Thompson added that he regrets the time lost with Mitchell, calling the wasted time “one of the biggest crimes I think you can do in life.”
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