You don’t have to be a regular viewer of Baywatch to know what it’s most famous for. The red swimsuits are iconic, of course, and then there’s the running. The slow-motion running scenes have been ingrained in pop culture for decades, and former star Nicole Eggert revealed the hilarious story about how they started and why some of those early sequences were “not cute.”
Nicole Eggert was one of several actors in the ’90s who found fame on Baywatch (which can be streamed with a Prime Video subscription), alongside Pamela Anderson, Yasmine Bleeth and Carmen Electra, to name a few. From 1992 to 1994, Eggert portrayed Summer Quinn, and she revealed on the Still Here Hollywood podcast that the running wasn’t originally intended to be slow motion. Eggert said:
We were the guinea pigs the first two seasons of this new look of Baywatch. Nobody mentioned the slow mo. I heard that [it] happened by accident in the editing room. It was a timing thing, and an editor put it in slow mo, the run, for a montage, and then everybody fell in love with it.
Talk about a happy accident! The Baywatch run has been parodied so many times over the years, so it’s wild to think it was just an off-the-cuff choice, presumably to stretch that portion of an episode. The problem with that, as Nicole Eggert points out, is that since the production crew didn’t know the scenes were going to be slow motion, neither did the actors. She continued:
So I was running full speed. And let me tell you something, full-speed running in slow motion is not cute. Not cute at all. So the actors later had it so much easier because they knew what they were going into.
If you’ve ever done the Baywatch run (and don’t lie, because we’ve ALL done it), you know there’s a different form to it than simply just sprinting from Point A to Point B. It’s more graceful and, dare I say, bouncy. In a full-speed run (especially on sand), you’re not worried about the lines of your body or your facial expression.
That puts Nicole Eggert and other early-season Baywatch cast members at a huge disadvantage. As she pointed out, by the time others joined the show, everyone in front of and behind the camera knew how those running scenes would air on TV.
Having that knowledge, however, didn't necessarily help when it came to the physical aspect of all that running. Carmen Electra, who played Lani McKenzie from 1997 to 1998, said her running footage had to be edited to make it look like she could keep up with the others around her.
Zac Efron, who starred in the 2017 Baywatch movie, likely has his own stories about how hard the beach run actually is. The actor shared a couple of behind-the-scenes images from the fun flick that show him wiping out spectacularly while trying to do the slow-mo run. Talk about something you don’t expect to see in slow motion!
I love Nicole Eggert’s peek behind the curtain to reveal the lore of how something so iconic as Baywatch’s running scenes came to be.
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