New 'Vacation' is thrill ride for Ed Helms

AUSTELL, Ga. — Ed Helms has all the essential qualities for a Griswold paterfamilias in a Vacation movie: affability, kindness, earnestness and a tendency to walk right into mishaps.

Headlining the next chapter of a classic comedy franchise (in theaters Wednesday) isn’t nerve-racking for him. What is, though, is strapping into a screaming roller coaster.

“I don’t know how my 40-year-old body is going to respond to this,” Helms says on a brisk morning at Six Flags Over Georgia, the theme park transformed into the Walley World set for the new Vacation.

The actor — best known for his stints on TV’s The Office and in The Hangover films — plays lovably nerdy Rusty Griswold, who leads his clan on a quest to reach California’s Walley World, just as his dad Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) did 32 years ago in the original Vacation.

With wife Debbie (Christina Applegate) and sons James (Skyler Gisondo) and Kevin (Steele Stebbins) in tow, Rusty reaches their destination after a series of trials that would impress Odysseus himself, and he rides the treacherous Velociraptor, an enhanced version of Six Flags’ Ninja coaster.

On this day sitting under Sky Buckets just within sight of Thunder River, Helms hasn’t yet boarded the towering thriller, but he’s feeling a little skittish about the whole situation. The Mind Bender was the main attraction when he was a kid growing up in nearby Atlanta,“but it’s now sort of insignificant,” he acknowledges. “This thing looks insane.”

He pauses, daunted. “I could get nauseous, I could break something, I could get dizzy and pass out, I could have spontaneous upchuck or diarrhea. Those are all very real possibilities.”

Being in a Vacation movie seems like a blast, but Helms had to think about it because he’s such a fan of the originals. “When I first got the script, I was like, ‘They’re remaking this? No way! I’m not even going to read it,’ ” he says. His manager suggested otherwise, and Helms liked that it was more of Rusty’s story than a retread of Clark’s.

Helms, now 41, was always the top choice for writer/directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein. “He’s a great successor to what Chevy did,” Goldstein says. “He’s an Everydad in the same way that Chevy was an Everydad for that era.”

Chase is one of Helms’ idols, but trying to imitate or replace him would be “a fool’s errand,” says Helms. The older actor reprises his iconic role for a scene in the new Vacation where Clark and wife Ellen (Beverly D'Angelo) reconnect with the younger brood. During filming, the 71-year-old asked to see some of the footage they'd filmed thus far, Helms says, “and he was really laughing at it, which pretty much validated all of my life choices up till now.”

While Clark is still very much the same guy, Helms felt he had freedom to bring “his own mojo” to his version of a grownup Rusty — mainly because there had been many Rustys before him, including Anthony Michael Hall (Vacation), Jason Lively (1985’s European Vacation), Johnny Galecki (1989’s Christmas Vacation) and Ethan Embry (1997’s Vegas Vacation).

The character is like Batman in that way, Helms figures. “I’m sure Christian Bale will be the next Rusty Griswold.”