Why DJ From Meg 2: The Trench Looks So Familiar

"Jason Statham fights a giant shark" is a concept that combines the logical culmination of the star's action career with a fun disaster movie blockbuster element, so it's no surprise that 2018's sci-fi action film "The Meg" proved popular enough to earn a sequel. The ending of "The Meg" reveals in barely concealed terms that the megalodons encountered in the movie weren't the only ones that managed to escape the Mariana Trench, and the title of the sequel reveals that this is indeed the case. 

The trailer for "Meg 2: The Trench" introduces the T.rex in the titular marine super beast's diet, and reveals that at least three Megs are now loose. Presumably, someone will end up calling the world's premier and only megalodon-fighting experts before long, which means that Statham's Jonas Taylor and the remainders of the first movie's ragtag team will likely find themselves treading water before long. Among that group we'll meet the skeptical DJ, once again played by Page Kennedy. Does he look familiar to you? Here's where you may have seen him before. 

Active in the industry since the early 2000s, Page Kennedy has played the guest star game long and well. In fact, his very second screen credit is a guest turn as Josh Langmead in "Six Feet Under" Season 2 episode "Out, Out Brief Candle," in which the Fishers are hired for a funeral of a young athlete. Kennedy continued his career as he started it, turning up for memorable guest roles in numerous high-profile shows like "Shield," "NYPD Blue," multiple "C.S.I." shows, "Boston Legal," and so forth. 

One of Kennedy's most memorable guest star roles is his turn as debt collector Curtis Mims in "Justified" Season 1, Episode 3. A peculiar character with aspirations for criminal greatness and a not-so-secret penchant for gardening, Mims is part of a plan to kidnap Arnold Pinter (David Eigenberg), but things go awry in a way you'd assume any plot in "Justified" to go.

In an interview with Numéro, Kennedy — who's a rapper as well as an actor — attributed his desire to exist in both worlds to Michael Jackson. "I already knew I wanted to be an actor since I was a little kid back in those days, like since I was seven years old, because I am a huge fan of Michael Jackson and Michael Jackson did a movie called 'The Wiz', where he played the scarecrow and I already was obsequious to him," Kennedy explained. "And so when I saw him do that movie and I saw him singing and dancing, I was like 'This is what I wanna do for the rest of my life, I wanna affect people the way he's affecting me'."

One of Page Kennedy's most recognizable roles is no doubt Louis "U-Turn" Wardell, the powerful drug dealer who makes aspiring marijuana dealer Nancy's (Mary-Louise Parker) life intensely difficult during Season 2 and Season 3 of "Weeds." A genuinely ruthless operator, U-Turn is a significant villainous force during Season 3 in particular, when he holds a significant debt over Nancy's head and trains her in the darker arts of their illegal business. 

In his Numéro interview, Kennedy named U-Turn as one of the roles he receives the most fan feedback for, and the decidedly villainous character is indeed a memorable figure with an arc that has an oddly fitting end. Though he was only in the cast of "Weeds" from 2006 to 2007 for a total of 11 episodes, and the show would go on to feature significantly higher-level villains, there's no denying that Kennedy made U-Turn one of the show's most dangerous characters. 

Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker's "Rush Hour" movie series shows the world how entertaining a buddy cop mismatch of a straight-laced Hong Kong martial arts supercop and a streetwise American detective can be. In 2016, the franchise expanded to the small screen with a similar premise, with Chan's Lee and Tucker's Carter now played by Jon Foo and Justin Hires. 

However, instead of focusing exclusively on the not-so-dynamic duo's attempts to deal with each other while trying to catch the dangerous crime lord known as the Dragon of the Quantou (James Hong), the show brings a few other major characters in the mix. One of the most intriguing is Page Kennedy's Gerald Page, who seems like a fairly common criminal but is actually Carter's cousin and lives a double life as the cop's top informant. Unfortunately, the show failed to find the requisite audience for a multi-season run, and ended after its sole season.  

Kennedy's character is based on Clifton Powell's Luke in the 1998 movie, but in an interview with Starry Mag, he noted that every actor brought their own version of their characters in the show instead of creating carbon copies of the originals. "We're not doing the same thing. We've all created our own adaptation of these characters," Kennedy said. He also reflected on the challenge of creating a small-screen reboot of such a well-known franchise. "When you have such an iconic name that you are going against, there are going to be people who are big fans of the franchise and movie," he said. "Those people sometimes take a little longer to come along on board, but then you have people who have never even seen the movies before. Our show is new and fresh to them and they like it. I, personally, have been getting a lot of accolades for my character and I think that is amazing."

Being a movie about not just one but multiple gigantic prehistoric sharks, "The Meg" has a fairly high mortality rate. However, Page Kennedy's  DJ actually belongs in that elite club, seeing as he walked away from the first movie. Not that the road has been easy, mind you. Though ostensibly a comic relief character, DJ might just enter the sequel with quite a bit of hurt, due to a prank gone wrong in "The Meg" that directly contributes to his friend The Wall's (Olafur Darri Olafsson) death. 

As Kennedy told Talking with Tami before the movie's premiere, however, "The Meg" is no emotional drama, but a proud blockbuster with the end goal to become the "Jaws" for modern times. "Well, we are hoping, so that's the goal," he said. "The goal is to start a whole new generation of kids that grow up with this movie like we did with Jaws. We want the first Meg to be the one. Jaws for them is so old, this is new and sexy."