‘Cuban Fury’: exclusive clip with Nick Frost and Rashida Jones

In the British dance-off rom-com “Cuban Fury,” Nick Frost plays a man who was a champion salsa dancer as a young boy who gave it up. Now an adult office drone, when a new boss arrives from America in the form of Rashida Jones, he is smitten. When he learns she is herself a salsa enthusiast, he is inspired to once again lace up his dancing shoes.

The film marks the first starring film role for Frost outside his collaborations with Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg on the films “Sean of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz,” “Paul” and last summer’s “The World’s End.” One night Frost sent producer Nira Park a half-drunk email outlining the idea for a romantic comedy with salsa dancing and the next thing he knew, they were making it.

“I’ve always liked dancing. I’ve always been good at dancing,” said Frost in a recent interview. “It’s almost like a dirty secret I couldn’t tell anyone, that I wanted to do a film where I danced a lot. It seemed like a ridiculous notion to me.”

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Frost and Jones took their dancing duties seriously, as Frost trained for 7 months and Jones trained for 2. While a dance double is used slightly more often for Jones to appear to land some tricky throwing moves, there are only three instances in the film where Frost himself isn’t doing his own dancing.

“I do not advise learning something new as an adult,” said Jones. “That’s not true, you should learn something new as an adult just to remember how bad you can be at things. It was an incredibly humbling process. But I was lucky to have Nick, he’s the most positive person. He’s even better than I in my fan brain decided he was going to be. He just a delight of a human being.”

In the above exclusive clip from the film, the pair have something of a meet-cute moment - though they’ve already met - when Jones’ character accidently hits Frost with her car. Hey, it happens.

We’ll have more on “Cuban Fury” next week.

Also:

‘The World’s End’ feels like a celebration

Sundance: Rashida Jones does romantic dramedy in ‘Celeste and Jesse Forever’

Jim Jarmusch on new ground with ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’

Follow Mark Olsen on Twitter: @IndieFocus