After decades of waiting, the end of the Bill & Ted trilogy is almost here. Bill & Ted Face the Music will see the slacker wannabe rock stars all grown up with families of their own, and apparently still being slacker wannabe rock stars. The duo have thus far failed to write the song that was destined to save humanity, forcing the future to once again intervene to be sure everything happens as it should.
While the new film will see the return of all our favorite characters, including not just Bill & Ted, but also Death, there will be at least one beloved character missing. George Carlin is no longer with us and so Rufus, the man who really started it all by giving Bill and Ted their first quest will also be gone. We've seen in the trailer for Face the Music that Kristen Schaal will be playing a new character who will be Bill and Ted's shepherd this time around, and in a new clip we learn a bit more about who the character is, and yes, she's connected to Rufus. Check it out.
So Kristen Schaal's character is named Kelly and she's actually the daughter of Rufus. This is actually a pair of connections to the late George Carlin. While we didn't know until now that Schaal was playing a character named Kelly, the writers of Bill & Ted Face the Music had previously revealed that there was a character named Kelly in the movie, who had been given that name because Carlin's own daughter was named Kelly. So in this case, Schaal's character is a tribute to both the fictional character of Rufus and the real man who played him as well.
While George Carlin's Rufus was certainly never the focus of the films, he was still very important to both of the previous movies. William Sadler, who plays Death, had previously stated that the loss of Carlin had been one of the major stumbling blocks to getting the third movie off the ground, as, without the man who acted as the catalyst for the action, it was difficult to build a new story.
This clip is also nice because it gives us some extended time with two of the film's important new characters, the daughters of Bill and Ted. Brigette Lundy-Paine plays Billie Logan and Samara Weaving takes the role of Thea Preston. We see from the trailer that the girls will go on a time-traveling adventure of their very own in parallel with the one their dads take to try and find the song they need to save reality from collapsing.
Bill & Ted Face the Music arrives on VOD and in select theaters on August 28.
