At the movies: Eugenie Bondurant goes camping
There’s a familiar face in the new comedy Summer Camp.
Kathy Bates, Diane Keaton and Alfre Woodard play three childhood friends who decide to re-visit the sleepaway camp experience of their childhood. Those three, of course, are well-known, but in St. Petersburg, the standout performance award goes to Eugenie Bondurant.
The longtime local resident has a small role in Summer Camp – in the cast list, the character is billed as “Sobbing Camper” – and she’s an unmistakable presence in the film’s uproarious trailer, in which she loudly channels John Belushi in Animal House.
“I’m in three scenes – the food fight is the longest,” explains Bondurant, whose movie CV includes one of the Hunger Games films, Fear of Rain, The Conjuring – the Devil Made Me Do It and more.
Summer Camp was filmed in the spring of 2023 at Camp Pinnacle, in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
“It was my birthday week,” recalls the actress. “So you can imagine, I was in my happy place, my birthday. I mean, come on! I don’t remember ever filming on set, on location, on my birthday. And I did!”
Her way in was Summer Camp writer and director Castille Landon, the Bradenton native whose breakout film was 2021’s Fear of Rain. Landon and the new movie’s producers wanted Bondurant in their new one.
Most of the cast and crew bunked in the Camp Pinnacle cabins.
“At the end of the day, if I was finished filming, I’d just pitch in,” Bondurant says. “I became crew. It was fun.
“I knew half the crew anyway, from working on Fear of Rain, and it’s the nicest feeling. And it was incredible working with Castille.
“But they tricked out a cabin for me – well, they put a cot in. Took three bunk beds out. Of course, I have no closet – my closet is a teeny, four-shelf bookshelf … it was cold, but they did put a heater above my bed. So I thought, OK, this is a win-win. Flannel sheets, a comforter and a heater. The bathrooms and the showers were down the trail.”
Everyone ate breakfast in the camp’s mess hall, which had seating for 500 campers.
“And when we wrapped for the day, I got to hang out with everyone. ‘Hey, we’re going to Cabin Such-and-Such.’ So like 10 of us would drink wine and talk. Or we’d hang around a campfire.
“You couldn’t ask for anything better.”
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