Information provided by the studio.

Apparition and Stage 6 Films
present
The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day
Screenplay by and Directed by Troy Duffy

Main Cast

Sean Patrick Flanery: Connor MacManus

Norman Reedus: Murphy MacManus

Billy Connolly: Poppa M

Clifton Collins, Jr.: Romeo

Julie Benz: Special Agent Eunice Bloom

Peter Fonda: The Roman

Judd Nelson: Concezio Yakavetta

David Della Rocco: Rocco

Bob Marley: Detective Greenly

Brian Mahoney: Detective Duffy

David Ferry: Detective Dolly

Official Synopsis

“Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” is the much-anticipated action sequel from Apparition and Stage 6 Films that picks up ten years after writer/director Troy Duffy’s THE BOONDOCK SAINTS, the tough, stylized, vigilante-justice saga that captured a massive cult following.

“Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day.” opens with fraternal twins Connor and Murphy MacManus deep in hiding in Ireland with their father, the enigmatic and notorious Il Duce from the first film (now known as “Poppa M”). The MacManus family has been living on an isolated sheep farm, as fugitives due to the slayings they religiously and notoriously perpetrated on Boston’s criminal underworld a decade before, including the very public execution of the city’s biggest crime lord. But the brothers have never forgotten the city they left behind, and when word that a beloved Boston priest has been slain and the killing made to look as though the Saints are responsible, Connor and Murphy cut their hair, dig up their rosaries and guns, suit up in their signature pea-coats armed with their .9MM and bid goodbye to their ailing father and smuggle themselves back to Boston to hunt down the real killers. Once again, they mount a violent and bloody crusade to bring justice to those responsible. This time they are aided by a Latino named Romeo, whose connections with the powerful “underground” Hispanic mob will help the brothers wreak revenge on the real killers.

The screen is filled with kick-ass gunplay and stunts throughout as the brothers take us on a roller coaster ride through the streets of Boston. Working the case are Boston detectives Greenly, Duffy and Dolly from the first film, who are sympathetic to the Saints (and complicit). They are joined in the investigation by the street smart and sexy FBI Special Agent Eunice Bloom, a protégé of FBI Special Agent Paul Smecker from the first movie.

As the central action unfolds, the film reveals a deeper mystery that gives insight into the MacManus family’s legacy of violence, with twists, turns and flashbacks to characters from the first film that help deepen the audience’s understanding of the complexities behind the vigilantes’ motives.

The film has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America and has a runtime of 117 minutes. The film will be released in select theaters on October 30.

There will be some spoilers in the podcast. Click at your own risk.

Now that the movie has been shown to fans, we can finally sit down and talk about it.

I saw “Boondock Saints II” last week. I liked it.

I didn’t like it in the way that I’m a news editor and occasional film critic. I didn’t love it in the way that I’m an artist and I can appreciate a classic piece of film.

Let’s face it, there’s two kinds of people in the world: The ones that love “The Boondock Saints” and the ones who hate “The Boondock Saints.”

And I love “The Boondock Saints.”

Shit, I put it on the cover. But I’m not a damn fanboy. I’m not a fanboy about anything. In fact, the more I like something, the harder I tend to be on the people in charge. You can ask the people at Sony when PlayStation 3 first came out, and you can ask Boondock writer/director Troy Duffy, because I changed the pace on Monday and asked him some pointed questions.

What you’re going to hear in the podcast on the top of this article is my session on one of a series of roundtable interviews that Duffy and actors Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, and Billy Connolly put on at The Black Rose bar in downtown Boston. We had a good time and we laughed throughout most of the 20-minute session, but I was on a mission to bring home some data for this piece of our month-long coverage on the sequel, “All Saints Day.” But, besides that, the podcast is mostly hilariousness and gay jokes.

“It was just like riding a bicycle,” Duffy said about his return to directing.

“He sucked equally on this one as he did in the first one,” Flanery added after a pause, laughing.

But return it is. Duffy made Boondock in 1999 and hasn’t made a film since. He was a young director coming out to Hollywood, and he made some mistakes — and I’m probably being nice here. But he still managed to make a good movie amidst it all.

“They talk about Troy as a new director, but from day one it looks as if he was doing it his whole life,” Connolly said.

Just as people either love or hate Boondock, they either love or hate Duffy. (The Documentary “Overnight” really hurt him too)

The people in the original movie seem to be loyalists. Nearly everybody — including someone you don’t expect (it’s in the podcast) — is back for the sequel.

“Everything just happened,” Connolly said. “Everybody seemed to be there for the love of the piece, not just to be in a movie or earn some money.”

It showed. When you listen to the podcast and check out our other interviews, you’ll hear how good of a time they all had making both movies.

Boondock is an organic cult success, and the cast and crew know it.

“Half of Boondock was one guy sitting another guy down going ‘you’re watching this movie,’” Duffy said.

Will there be a third movie?

“Lets just ride this one into the shore and see what happens,” Duffy said. “I got some ideas.”

It’s also up to the studio and the fans. If the sequel makes money in theaters, I say bet on a trilogy.

At the end, I asked Duffy what we could expect from him going forward.

“During that 10-year period, I have written a bunch of scripts,” he said, “and I intend to knock them down like dominoes one by one. They’re in ascending budgets, all different stories. One is a period piece, a buddy comedy, a black comedy, one is about serial killers, one is called “The Peregrines” which would take me an hour to describe what the’s about, one is about a historical figure, which will take a lot of money to do that last one.”

The four guys also toured Boston College and Emerson College before premiering the movie for fans on Monday night. Here’s a vid from their day:

“Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” is in theaters October 30.

Without giving away too much, we can say that good ole George gets the crap embarrassed out of him by the brothers in the flick.

We saw the movie, but it doesn’t officially realize until October 30, so take some time to get to know Rubin.

BLAST: So Bob, tell us a little about yourself. I see a mix of film, tv, writing and comedy in your background.

BOB RUBIN: Everyone knows that as a baby, I was abandoned in the woods and raised at the end of a stick by a pack of wild corndogs. After years of
battling condiment addiction, I pulled myself together, started stand up and in only 26 years I made it to an obscure, cult hit status.

That’s 26 years of maximun R&B (rambles and babbles). The rest of the story is at Rubetime.com.

BLAST: What is your role in “Boondock Saints II?”

BR: I play Gorgeous George, a pivitol character in the storyline of “BDSll,” and another awsomely memorable character created by Troy Duffy.

BLAST: Tell us about “Gorgeous George” — what went into that character?

BR: To prepare for the role, I spent a week watching “The Sound of Music” over and over. When that didn’t work, I conjured up the spirit of Otto Preminger who told me to fatten up on Chubby Chug Bacon Beer.

BLAST: How did you get involved in Boondock Saints II?

BR: I was walking down the midway at a carnival when Troy hit me in the head with a sledge hammer on his backswing during a try at the
strength skill game, ring the bell. I was in a coma for a week. When I came to I was okay, except I lost all my 4’s, which screwed up a lot of my phone numbers and some uncashed checks I had. Anyhow, Troy felt so bad he put me in his movie.

BLAST: Any plans to come to Boston?

BR: Oh hell yes. I love Boston. Great town and it’s been way too long since I’ve been there. Don’t know when, but I’ll see ya there soon.

Enjoy the movie, it kicks ass.

Catch Bob Rubin in “The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” in theaters October 30.

Mahoney was Detective Duffy in “The Boondock Saints,” playing one of a trio of bumbling Boston police officers.

Mahoney admits he started out late in the game, but he’s catching up. He told us that he’s appearing in a scene with Matt Damon in “The Adjustment Bureau,” which is filming right now.

Mahoney sat down with Blast recently to talk about the career and his role in the sequel, “The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day.”

BLAST: What can we expect from Detective Duffy this time around?

BRIAN MAHONEY: I get to move around a lot more this time around. There’s more action with me involved.

BLAST: What’s it like re-uniting with the cast 10 years later?

BM: It was great. Sean (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Norm (Norman Reedus) are the coolest guys. It was especially special getting back with Bob Marley, and I think that translates onscreen.

Cliff Collins, who is an Oscar winner, is so good! I was so excited to work with him. I even prepared by taking some Irish dancing lessons for a scene to prepare. I never needed to actually dance, but I was ready!

BLAST: Coming from a military background to a film career is an interesting career change. You are going tell us about the transition in the book that you’re writing, “A Cobra Pilot in Hollywood.” What can you tell us here?

BM: Well, in the army it’s a whole “think, don’t feel” concept, and this was embedded in me for ten whole years. So when I made that transition into acting, it was instantly “feel, don’t think.” It was “you need to FEEL this scene.” This was so new to me, and a total challenge. So I’ll be touching on that a lot.

BLAST: You’re from Framingham originally — do you come back often?

BM: Oh yes, we do quite a bit. My wife is also from Gardner so we enjoy coming back to Massachusetts.

BLAST: For the October 30 release, what would you like to tell fans?

BM: Thank you. Thank you for all the replies all over the world we’ve received. So much has happened and we need to set some things straight, so I’m looking forward to that. Troy deserves this he really does. There was a documentary called “Overnight” that really hit Troy hard. It was hurtful, and stabbed him in the back. He deserves this comeback.

It’s the stuff of a movie itself — our hero is in a nasty car crash, laid up in a hospital bed for weeks, and he needs an interpreter to tell him what the doctors are saying. He’s black-and-blue, his face is badly swollen, and he wears an eye patch to cover the scars from the surgery to implant an artificial eye socket.

But his devotion to his art is true. He devises and storyboards a movie from that hospital bed and sneaks out late at night. He flies to Los Angeles with the eye patch still attached to his face and directs the movie he envisioned.

Fiction this is not.

It’s part of how Norman Reedus spent the ten years between “Boondock Saints” installments. Reedus, who plays Murphy McManus in the upcoming sequel, “Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day,” said he “dropped off the face of the earth for a while” following a serious accident several years ago.

“It was pretty dramatic, I didn’t think I’d be an actor again,” Reedus said. But even if he had been unable to act, he planned on staying in movies. And his short film “I Thought of You” is proof-positive of that fact. Reedus escaped briefly from a hospital in Germany to shoot the movie, which he wrote and assembled from his hospital bed.

And though Reedus said he was worried he didn’t look the same after the accident, Boondock fans still approach him daily, recognizing him on the street.

“I’m impressed every day. Sometimes people come up and they have my face tattooed on them,” he said. “I say, ‘I hope you were drunk when you got that.’ Almost 90 percent of the time they say, ‘yes I was.’”

Reedus said that in the ten years since the original movie, there were several false starts at getting “Boondock Saints II” up and moving.

“It came and it went so many times in the last ten years,” he said. “You get excited and you start to work with your schedule.”

But when the project was finally green-lit, Reedus said it was easy to drop back into Murphy McManus mode.

“I started working with a trainer right away, with a dialect coach right away. Then it was just ‘Boondock Saints’ camp,” he said. And gathering everybody together again helped, too. “It was a déjà vu once we got on the set and in the peacoats, once we got the guns and started reciting the prayers and stuff.”

And that thick Irish accent that Murphy has? It’s not natural.

“It’s not super hard once you get going with it. Everybody on the set’s speaking like that all day long,” he said.

Reedus’ impression of his character is one of respect and awe.

“They sort of have this calling from a higher power to take out the bad guys that have slipped through society and are getting away with it,” he siad. “I don’t think they’re bad killers or nasty people, they’re just stepping up to the plate.” The public really connected with the Saints in the first movie, and the controversy of are-they-good-or-are-they-bad helps them relate, he said.

The new “Boondock Saints” movie isn’t the only chance the public will have to connect with Reedus this fall — he’s also got a new movie, “Pandorum,” which recently hit theaters. Reedus described the film as a sci-fi thriller set in an abandoned spaceship.

Reedus also addressed amost important question: Will there be a Boondock Saints III?

“I hope so — I could do a bunch of these,” he said. But he added he hoped it wouldn’t be ten years down the road, imagining “Sean and I walking with walkers, trying to lift our guns and we can’t get them up. Hiding out in an old-folks home in Miami.”

And he doesn’t mean knocking down a mafioso or some badass Russian crime boss.

Ten years ago, David Della Rocco played a character named after him, but the character is not him. Rocco, a college-educated, classical actor, couldn’t be farther removed from the dumbass street thug he plays in the “Boondock Saints” movies. He had to knock himself down a little bit to his character’s level.

He did like the freedom in the dialog and the way he was able to put some of himself into the character, but David is not Rocco.

“I had a lot of freedom,” he said, “in the way, you look at the script and — Troy directs what he wants for an emotion — and basically I could use so much of myself, which is really nice when you’re an actor.”

This student of the stage still doesn’t have many Hollywood films to his name, and that’s become hard to believe because he’s recognized everywhere for his role in “Boondock Saints,” which is extremely popular in Boston and a cult classic everywhere else.

In fact, the only other film to his name is 2008’s “Jake’s Corner,” about an ex-football star who has a family tragedy. He plays a minor character named “Wheels.” He said he’d love to get more roles, but acknowledged how hard it is to make a living as an actor.

He told Blast that he reprises his role in “All Saints Day” in a dream sequence in three different spots, filmed in three locations, where he interacts with the two brothers.

Rocco lives in Hollywood and has a girlfriend named Debra Donovan.

As for his favorite Rocco line in the two films, he threw a nod to the often vulgar writing in the flicks:

“Shut your fat ass, Rayvie! I can’t go and buy a pack of smokes without running into nine guys you’ve fucked!”

Bob Marley’s not a reggae star. He’s a local boy, from New England. He’s the comedian who gained some measure of fame for his role as the bumbling Detective Greenly in “The Boondock Saints.”

His most famous line — “Where you goin? NO WHERE” — can still be heard 10 years later at bars across Boston.

We tapped the phones in the Blast newsroom to Podcast our 20-minute interview with Marley, where we talked about terrorism, comedy and most of all the hotly anticipated sequel to the 1999 cult classic (if all of Boston is considered one big cult) “Boondock Saints.” Marley reprises his role in “Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day,” which is due out October 30, despite the utter lack of publicity surrounding the flick so far.

Contrary to some published reports, Marley hadn’t known “Saints” director Troy Duffy since childhood. They met about 12 years ago.

“A buddy of mine introduced me to Troy and then they came to see me at The Laugh Factory (in Los Angeles) and he said ‘come audition,’” Marley said. “When that movie came out it was like nothing happened, and we were like ‘oh I guess nothing’s going to happen.’”

But something did happen. Suddenly, larger crowds were coming out to his shows, and they started firing lines from the movie up on stage.

“Then I realized it was taking off,” he said.

The original film helped lift the careers of the actors and comedians like Marley and guys like Brian Mahoney, and David Ferry. Marley said it was vital to bring this trio of cops back — as well as so many other actors, right down to the more obscure Tom Barnett, who plays the Irish gun dealer in both films.

So why did it take 10 years to make another “Boondock Saints?” In that case, the published reports are true. Duffy had problems with Franchise Films — and there was money involved. It was one big mess.

We do know that Marley’s character, the Boston Police Detective, will have a larger role in the sequel. He even tries to get with the gorgeous FBI Agent Eunice Bloom (Julie Benz).

Over the past decade, rumors flew around about a sequel, including one that would be set in New York. Marley was glad, however, that the film came home.

“I’m glad its in Boston and I’m glad it takes place in New England,” he said.

Although, despite the tax credits and “Hollywood East” mantra, the film was shot in Canada.

Marley said it was also fun to have a bunch of jackasses like comedians on set.

“Everybody on the film’s got a great sense fo humor, so it’s hard not to just sit there and laugh,” he said. “Judd Nelson is in this movie, and his part is menacing and yet hilarious at the same time. He’s really, really funny in the movie. There’s a bunch of clowns.”

Marley’s official website

“The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day … is the continuation of writer/director Troy Duffy’s tough, stylized cutting edge saga of the MacManus brothers (Norman Reedus, Sean Patrick Flanery),” according to the film synopsis. “The two have been in deep hiding with their father, Il Duce (Billy Connolly), in the quiet valleys of Ireland, far removed from their former vigilante lives. When word comes that a beloved priest has been killed by sinister forces from deep within the mob, the brothers return to Boston to mount a violent and bloody crusade to bring justice to those responsible.”

The film will be familiar but not exactly the same. Poor “Rocco” (David Della Rocco) was killed off in the last movie, so the saints add a new partner and new comic relief in Clifton Collins Jr, but David Della Rocco is credited in the film, so we’ll see if that’s just a flashback or more, but at 1:38 in the trailer, you do see what appears to be Rocco, himself, for a split second.

Willem Dafoe is not in the sequel, but his self-hating, gay, cross-dressing FBI agent character is replaced by Julie Benz, in the biggest role ever for the mostly TV and video game actress who’s in the show “Dexter.”

Judd Nelson plays Concezio Yakavetta, the revenge-seeking son of the saint’s old enemy, mafia boss Papa Joe Yakavetta.

Billy Connolly is back as the father, and the original Boston Police Department detectives, including Boston comedian Bob Marley are back.

And, of course, Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus are back as the saints.

Original murmurs about the Boondock Saints sequel had them going to New York, instead of Boston. It appears that they’re rightly back in Beantown, however.

By the way, in case you need a reminder how bloody old you’ve gotten, Boondock Saints came out in 1999. That’s 10 years ago, kids.

P.S. The song in the trailer is “The Saints Are Coming” by The Skids. U2 and Green Day covered it after Hurricane Katrina.

Set for $34.99, the Boondock Saints Blu-ray features deleted scenes and outakes with commentary from cast and crew and a special director’s cut.

We would like to see a “Saints” documentary or featurette — something NEW that you couldn’t find on the DVD and Special Edition DVD of the movie.

Boondock Saints is one of the great cult classics of all time, but moreso if you live in Boston.

Just in case you aren’t familiar:

Irish brothers Connor and Murphy MacManus live and work in South Boston. After killing a Russian mobster in self-defense, the brothers believe they have found their calling from God ridding the earth of human evil. So they set out to complete their divine deed by ridding the streets of gangsters, criminals and lowlifes; and as the body count rises, the brothers become local heroes (deemed the “Boondock Saints”) even as the police are on their trail. By risking their lives for their beliefs of Veritas (truth) and Aequitas (justice), the vigilante brothers take the law into their own hands…until they are pursued by unorthodox FBI agent Paul Smecker who follows their trail of bloodshed, but admits that the boys are doing exactly what he has always secretly wished to happen.