‘Footloose’ star Lori Singer choreographed ‘extremely intense’ domestic violence scene

“Footloose” director Herbert Ross put a lot of trust in his cast — especially Lori Singer, who made her big screen debut in the 1984 classic.

Singer, now 66, reflected on the film’s controversial domestic violence scene, which she helped choreograph, while marking its 40th anniversary.

“Footloose” followed Ren McCormack (Bacon), a Chicago teen who moved to a small town where the local minister (John Lithgow) put a ban on dancing. Singer co-starred as Ariel Moore, the minister’s rebellious daughter who was Ren’s love interest. 

Ariel also had a boyfriend, Chuck Cranston (Jim Youngs), who physically assaults her because he’s jealous about her feelings for Ren, before they break up. 

“I choreographed a lot of the physical stuff,” Singer exclusively told The Post. 

“I grew up with three brothers, I spent part of my life in Texas. I’ve had to actually fight a few times….Anyway, I’ve had some rough stuff happen, because we traveled a lot growing up, my family,” she continued. “I think a lot of actors – have had that experience that you have to reinvent yourself every time. All that fighting stuff….I’ve actually experienced a certain amount of it.”

She gushed that Ross “trusted his actors” on set as they collaborated together.

“Herb would do something very interesting. He’d say, ‘How do you feel this? What do you think might happen if you guys were here?’ And he’d step back,” she explained.

Ariel and Chuck’s brutal scene included Singer at one point taking a bat and destroying his pickup truck.

“We rehearsed weeks before we shot, so it would play in our minds to have been lived when we got there. And it was choreographed that way, comes from the bleachers. And I said, ‘No, this is how I’d break the truck up. I break it up like this.’ I think at first they thought I was just going to break the windshield, but I said, ‘No, no, I go boom, boom.’”

“I had a feeling of what I would I would do in that character,” she went on, “and Herb let me do it.”

Singer also felt comfortable with Youngs despite their rough sequence “fighting on the ground.”

“He’s a wonderful actor — just tremendous. And so the two of us played very well together off each other. It was hard to shoot. It was very emotional,” she told the Post. “We didn’t get a lot of takes.”

The scene was complicated to film, however, because she got dizzy from smoking nicotine.

“I’d lie down. I had to take ten minutes, which is a long time on a set. I’d say, ‘I need ten minutes.’ Because I was getting so dizzy and angry. And it was extremely intense.”

“When the truck actually skittered away, zooms and drives away, and I’m on the ground…Some of the rocks flew up,” she went on. “A lot of times with stunts, what you don’t anticipate happening can be dangerous. And so that was just fortunate. I had a few marks on my hand, but nothing else happened.” 

Elsewhere, Ross sometimes “changed things” while he directed.

“For example, with John Lithgow at the top of the stairs when I come in late one night, he says, ‘Where were you after we went dancing?’ We rehearsed that scene, and we’re just about to shoot it with me at the top of the stairs and John at the bottom of the stairs when Herb reversed it. And that was a big reversal that changes the dynamic tremendously. So, he was a living director.” 

Singer said that she related to Ariel because of her own childhood. 

“My father was a conductor of orchestras. So our family was very looked at wherever we went from town to town. We were very much under a microscope. My father was extremely demanding,” she recalled. “After the audition, when I was flying back on the plane, I just thought they could pick someone else for this role, but I am this role. So it’s up to them. I didn’t have any bad feeling about whatever would happen.”

She calls Ariel “an archetype” and “an American hero.”

“That’s what she is, a rebel, an American rebel. And, at every turn, she’s challenging everything. She’s challenging her father, she’s challenging the town.”

“She stands in front of a train. She gets the new boy in town to do a tractor race. He’s never been on a tractor…Kevin gives a rabble rouser performance and convinces our town. So it’s that catalyst. It’s that combination that was magical,” she added. “It was a combination of the outsider, of Kevin, with the rebel girl in the town. I think it catches fire with this movie and is singular in terms of the way it’s expressed. It’s real American hero and archetype, but it’s a woman. It’s a young girl.”