Ashley Benson’s “Spring Breakers” Secrets

The sexy star of the bikini outlaw flick reveals behind-the-scenes secrets.

Patrick Carone

Mar 20, 2013

The sexy star of the bikini outlaw flick reveals behind-the-scenes secrets.

Opening this weekend, Spring Breakerstells the story of four college girls who go on the ultimate spring break adventure. (And by “ultimate,” we mean lots of guns, drugs, sex, and crime.) The film stars two former Disney good girls—Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens—as well as former Pretty Little Liars star Ashley Benson. So what really went down while they were shooting this naughty movie? Here’s what Ashley told us.

The girls actually bonded.

“When we got to Florida, Harmony Korine, the director, really harped on the four of us being with each other all day every day. So we got a whole week of just rehearsing and hanging out. All of us got along so well, and Vanessa and I were born a few days apart, so we’re quite similar.”

They didn’t stick to the script.

“We got to improv a lot, which I’d never done, and I don’t think the other girls had either. It was my first time being able to do and say what I wanted. Every take was different: some lasted 10 minutes, some lasted one minute, and some had no talking at all. It wasn’t your average memorize-every-single-word-and-if-you-miss-a-word-you-have-to-start-over experience, and that’s what made it so awesome.”

Fans snuck on the set.

“Word got around that we were filming, and every day we would have people by the set waiting. They’d say they were working on the movie, or that they were extras, so they could get on set. We finally buckled down security, and no one was allowed anywhere. It was crazy!”

James Franco stayed in character.

“The first time I met him, he was in costume. He came out of his trailer and had cornrows, tattoos everywhere, and gold teeth, so we met James as his character, Alien, rather than James himself. Alien has an accent, and he kept it whether we were filming or not. It was really funny; the whole time we only knew him as that character. He did a lot of research for the role…”

Shooting fake guns was really scary.

“This sounds horrible, but there’s something about holding a gun. Obviously the ones that we had were fake, but you still feel like there’s so much power in your hands. I never knew what that was like, and it’s actually really scary, because when you have one, you just become a different person. I’d never shot a gun before, and you can see in the movie that I back up because I was so scared to shoot it. I thought it was going to blow back in my face and burn me.”

Spring Breakers opens Friday, March 22.

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Ashley Benson’s “Spring Breakers” Secrets

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