Dermot’s excellent adventure

A WELL-known disability rights campaigner from Tyrone has bagged himself a “most excellent” appearance in the latest film from one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Dermot Devlin will be featuring in Bill & Ted Face the Music, which sees Keanu Reeves once again returning to the role which launched his glittering career on the silver screen more than 30 years ago. The modest Greencastle man may describe his brief cameo in the film as “blink and you’ll miss it”, but it is something of a dream come true for the movie buff.

Dermot has been a big fan of the Bill & Ted series ever since Reeves and co-star Alex Winter had their “Excellent Adventure” way back in 1989.

The cult classic, which mixed time travel, comedy and rock music, was followed several years later by their “Bogus Journey”.

The founder of the My Way Access website said he had grown up watching the adventures of Bill & Ted.

His upcoming appearance came about after star Alex Winter made an appeal on Twitter during the Covid-19 lockdown inviting people to be a part of the film.

For the craic, Dermot decided to apply and was sent back a piece of music and asked to make a short video clip to go along with it. To his surpise, he was told a month later that it had been selected to be used in the end credits of the film!

He told the Tyrone Herald, “Without giving too much away, the piece of music is quite crucial to the film. For something I did to kill 20 minutes during a quiet lockdown day, it’s quite surreal to end up in a movie along with Keanu Reeves.”

With the film having already been released in the USA, Dermot has been getting messages from people he knows on the other side of the Atlantic about his big screen debut.
“It may only be a second long, but it must be a very noticeable second,” he joked.

In a further intriguing twist, the Tyrone man has also discovered that the song that plays out at the end of the film was actually co-written by a distant relative!

Dermot added, “After the film came out in America, I found out that Sean Fitzgerald, who co-wrote the track, is actually a descendant of a member of our family who left Ireland for the US several generations ago.”