Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
He became a household name as David Silver in the TV smash “Beverly Hills, 90210.”
On Thursday, Brian Austin Green stars in the new movie “Bootyology,” which makes its world premiere at the D.C. Independent Film Forum at E Street Cinema at 7:15 p.m.
“It’s half documentary, half mockumentary,” Green told WTOP. “It is a mockumentary in the sense that a large part of it is for entertainment purposes, but there is a reality to it. … The Booty Boys existed in the early 2000s, they performed at different places, they got a record deal with a record label, but it turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, so it kind of fell apart.”
The movie poster is a rump-shaped peach with the tagline: “No ifs, no ands, only butts.”
“I thought the whole thing was a joke, but they were like, ‘Oh, no, it’s real,'” Green said. “In the documentary you’ll see tons of footage of them actually performing. … I think they’re actually performing after the premiere. … They’ll be getting on stage and rocking a little bit, so it’s fun for any fan of hip-hop or that time period. It’s a real fun flashback to that.”
Green of course plays himself, reflecting on his own rap career in the ’90s.
“One of the MCs they really looked up to was me,” Green said. “I come on screen to be on camera to support them, but it’s a really fun mockumentary-style interview. … There’s as much me in it as you can obviously tell from watching it. You can tell when I’m riffing and having fun and when I’m not, but it’s a great project. They’re super funny guys.”
Born in North Hollywood in 1973, Green got into performing at a young age.
“My dad is a drummer professionally, so I grew up with him touring,” Green said. “I went to all music schools when I was younger. That was my plan. … A kid that I rode the bus with to elementary school always had really cool stuff. I said, ‘How do you get all this stuff?’ He was like, ‘Oh, I do commercials and my parents let me keep a percentage of what I make.'”
He immediately told his parents that he wanted to be an actor at age 9.
“I was going to an elementary school on the USC campus called 32nd Street,” Green said. “We used to have student directors from USC that would come over to our school and pick out kids for their graduate projects. … I enjoyed being on a set. … I didn’t think that was something average people could do! … To me, television was this magical, mystical place.”
Green soon signed with his friend’s agent, who got him tons of auditions.
“Once I booked my first commercial, I felt like, ‘Oh, I get this, I can do this,'” Green said. “I booked commercial after commercial after commercial. I probably did 75 of them.”
He landed his first TV role on the “Dallas” spinoff “Knots Landing” (1986-1989).
“I did ‘Knots Landing’ from age 10 to 14 1/2,” Green said. “I was doing that while I was doing commercials. … That set was all adults, so I really had to pay attention to what was going on and be an adult myself and take it seriously. I learned a lot on that set. That was my first big introduction into the world of celebrity and teen magazines.”
These magazines caught the attention of “90210” producer Aaron Spelling, father of Tori.
“Tori used to read a lot of teen magazines; we were the same age,” Green said. “She told her dad, ‘Hey, you should see this guy.’ … I don’t think I was on [Creator] Darren Star’s radar. … It was a big thing for Aaron because it was his last go-round. If it didn’t succeed, he was going to bow out gracefully, having made a couple dozen amazing shows.”
Needless to say, the show became a pop-culture phenomenon of primetime teen drama.
“It really changed lives when it came out,” Green said. “Nothing like it had ever been on television: a nighttime drama about kids that starred kids that followed their lives exactly. When it was Spring Break, we had Spring Break episodes, when we had the fall dance, it would be the fall dance in real life. Our show followed the absolute pattern of school.”
He said it was the perfect show for the pre-internet age of television.
“It wouldn’t have survived a time period like [today],” Green said. “Because the internet didn’t exist at that point and there was no way of real fact checking, it forced people to sit and watch and enjoy it, brainlessly or otherwise. Aaron Spelling was a genius with that. He understood that people needed an escape. … It ended up being an escape for a decade.”
Indeed, Green was one of the few cast members to last the entire run from 1990-2000.
“I was there the whole way, Ian [Ziering] was there, Jennie [Garth] was there, Tori was there, Luke [Perry] wasn’t there, Jason [Priestley] wasn’t there whole time; we were the main four that stuck it out the whole 10 years, as negative or positive as that can be looked at,” Green said. “It was an amazing run. It was amazing to spend my young life doing it.”
The consistent work schedule gave him space to dabble in other areas like rap music.
“We would get season pickups, not for a season, but like, ‘Oh, you’re picked up for another three seasons,'” Green said. “It was like, ‘Oh man, I have another three years of job security! I’m good!’ … That’s when I really got into the studio and started getting back into my music because I had the time and the freedom to do it. I had guaranteed income.”
He even appeared on the pilot of the spinoff “Melrose Place,” one of many similar teen TV series that followed in its wake, from “Dawson’s Creek” to “The O.C.” to “One Tree Hill.”
“We opened a door,” Green said. “I’m happy for everyone that’s had success in that genre of television because it’s not an easy one. It’s a fickle one. … There are even a handful that Spelling did after ‘90210’ like ‘Models Inc.’ [that failed]. It wasn’t a tried and true genre, you just had to have a cast that struck some sort of magical chord.”
Instead of getting typecast, Green played Derek on “The Sarah Connor Chronicles.”
“I’ve been really blessed,” Green said. “I did ‘Resurrection Boulevard,’ which was a Showtime show when ‘90210’ ended, I did ‘Terminator,’ I did ‘Desperate Housewives,’ I did a show ‘Wedding Band,’ … ‘Freddie’ for ABC, ‘Anger Management’ for FX, ‘Smallville,’ I just had a little run on ‘The Connors,’ which hopefully soon I’ll be going back to.”
He even recently performed on the reality competition “The Masked Singer.”
“The main reason I decided to do that show was because I grew up with Robin Thicke, so I thought it would be fun to see how long it would take for Robin to guess it’s me, which he never did,” Green said. “They came to me after that and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do this “Masked Dancer,” do you want to do a season of that?’ So I ended up being a panelist.”
This led to “Dancing with the Stars,” where he met current girlfriend Sharna Burgess.
“They had come to me for 13 seasons before that and it had been a hard pass for me because I’m an actor,” Green said. “I was and am still with Sharna. She grew up dancing and is incredibly passionate it. … When they approached me, they said, ‘We want to have you and Sharna paired up together’ — it just seemed like the right timing.”
Their romance has allowed him to heal after a high-profile divorce in 2021.
“I’ve had such a crazy two years, to come out of it with such an amazing relationship and partner is way more than I ever could have imagined,” Green said. “Sometimes one door has to close for another door to open. The past two years … was a big catalyst for me for change and to find out who I really wanted to be as a person, a parent, a friend, a son.”
In fact, Green and Burgess just announced some big personal news.
“We have a baby due on the Fourth of July,” Green said. “Sharna’s Australian and was like, ‘Leave it to me to want the birth of my first child to be a national holiday with fireworks.’ … We’re super excited for it, just so blessed. She’s going to be such an amazing mom. She’s already an amazing mother to my kids now. They love having her around.”
Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame.”
