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There's no shortage of fans who wonder what happened to Shane West after A Walk To Remember. The man was an absolute heartthrob. Not only did Mandy Moore kind of fall in love with him, but so did everyone else who saw the Adam Shankman film. In so many ways, Shane was the ideal romantic lead for the movie based on a Nicholas Sparks novel.
A Walk To Remember is widely seen as one of the best Nicholas Sparks movies but it didn't exactly make Shane West a household name. But he has continued acting in between a secret music career...
Why Shane West Was Cast In 'A Walk To Remember'
Shane West told Vulture that the reason he went up for the part of Landon Carter in A Walk To Remember was really due to needing a job. He was, more or less, at the start of his career and the chance at playing the romantic lead in a Nicholas Sparks story was too good to pass up.
"I don’t think I was very picky at that time, but I had the luxury of being on a television show at the time called Once and Again. I had done two teen films prior to A Walk to Remember that, for studio films, just didn’t do as well, monetarily. I loved the Nicholas Sparks story; I immediately loved the director, Adam Shankman. I obviously knew of Mandy Moore, but I didn’t know of her as an actress," Shane explained.
"You didn’t want to do too many teen films and not have them do well. But this one was so special in story and content. Adam said something immediately at the very end of the project, 'Worst-case scenario, we brought the cast together. Just know that you guys all made a great movie. Whether anyone sees it or not doesn’t matter. Just be proud of what you did.' And that’s kind of our thoughts going into it. This was a great story, and it deserved to be told. But we didn’t know what was going to happen, of course."
Shane West's Music Is In 'A Walk To Remember'
In many ways, Shane was the perfect person to play the constantly brooding Landon Carter. But fans may not know that he was particularly suited for the role because of his pursuit of fame as the frontman of a band in the ever-morose punk rock genre.
"That is another reason why I think I got [the role]," Shane explained. "At the time, I was playing a little bit of a brooding son on Once and Again. I had a band that I was trying to get off the ground. I was always into rock and roll and punk rock, so transitionally, it was kind of me."
While Mandy Moore was known for music (which was heavily featured in A Walk To Remember) no one knew Shane was curious about the field as well. A snippet of Shane's work was, however, featured in the movie after the director caught wind of what Shane was doing.
"My little band at the time was called Average Joe, but we were just playing for fun. Nothing was copyrighted. By the time we wrote this song [“So What Does It All Mean?”] and the soundtrack accepted it, we couldn’t get the rights to Average Joe, and we had no idea what to name ourselves in the 24 hours to do so. So we just threw our last names on it, [and] it looks like a law firm. So if you basically look at the soundtrack, I think it says West, Gould, Fitzgerald, or something like that, which are just our last names. Later we changed [our name] to Jonny Was. But the cool thing about that was I knew Mandy was getting music on the soundtrack. I knew that was a part of the deal — as she should. I brought up a song I had written and thought it would work for the film, depending on if they wanted that kind of style of music or not. They said, 'Look, we loved the demo, but you need to spend the money to produce this for real, and I can’t promise you anything. Even when you do spend the money, we still may not accept it.' We rolled the dice, went up to Oakland, and we recorded with Sandy Pearlman, who is famous from the Blue Öyster Cult days. [We] got it produced properly, and we got a gold record out of it, so that’s pretty neat."
The song did end up on the soundtrack and was even featured in the movie when Landon pulled up in the Mustang to haze the kid at the beginning of the story.
"There’s a moment where you can hear loud rock music before I turn the car keys off. That’s the song. That’s Adam doing that. He didn’t need to do that. They could have just slapped it on the soundtrack as a song that no one heard."
What Band Was Shane West In?
After Shane and his bandmates turned Average Joe into Jonny Was, they soon found out that pursuing a career in music wasn't the easiest path to go down. Instead, Shane wanted to spend more time on acting. Although he did find himself in another band...
"Reality set in. We turned into Jonny Was, and I started working on ER, and around that exact time, I had done a film called What We Do Is Secret that was based on this old-school punk-rock band called the Germs. In reality, I actually joined them. They got back together, and I started singing for them for probably like five or six years [until 2009]. We toured around, and it was pretty wild. It was very underground, and ER was very accommodating, even though they probably didn’t know half the time that I would run off and play a show. But it was such an amazing experience. Someday I’ll have to write about it, but it kind of cured my pop-punk aspirations at the time."