Weird, by my conservative estimate, is about 93% phony baloney. In that respect, it’s a bit like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the 2007 rockumentary about a fake country star played by John C. Reilly that took a flamethrower to every corn-assed cliche of the musical biopic. But it’s a little funnier — and stranger — to construct such a goofy narrative about a real person, since, in reality, Weird Al is a very friendly, very thoughtful person whose work is the product of hard work, ingenuity, and kindness. Weird, meanwhile, constructs an alternate timeline of Yankovic’s life in which he dates Madonna, feuds with Colombian cocaine magnate Pablo Escobar, and conjures hit song after hit song off the top of his head, as geniuses in flattering biopics often do. In this world, “Amish Paradise” is not a play on the Coolio classic, but a deeply personal song Yankovic writes in order to reconnect with his distant father. “The fact that someone was letting us make something so fucking crazy was just really exciting,” Radcliffe says. Weird Al is pop culture’s most famous parody artist, and while the breadth and success of his musical goofs is undeniably impressive, it’s impossible to be too serious about “I Love Rocky Road.”
And there’s a knowing pleasure in watching someone as recognizable as Radcliffe become unrecognizable in this role. As director Eric Appel explains, his leading man “gave us a great joke, which is that Daniel Radcliffe is going to play the most iconic character of his career,” says director Eric Appel. The joke, obviously, is that nothing Radcliffe does will ever supersede the prominence of Potter in our cultural firmament. It seems like it could be overwhelming, to be permanently defined by a role you took on before you’d hit puberty, and the difficulty in transitioning from childhood to adulthood is what’s animated every ominously narrated TMZ segment about a former kid star gone bad. But Radcliffe does not make it seem like this.
Mere numbers cannot capture the tonnage of attention dumped on Radcliffe from all sides over the last 20 years. Forget the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or even Tumblr: Harry Potter was the launching pad for the dynamics of modern fandom that now animate any successful cultural franchise, and by extension all of popular culture. In layman’s terms, somewhere between “a lot” and “a whole fucking lot” of people have wondered what Radcliffe is doing or thinking at any given moment of his life. But if it’s strange to be synonymous with the cross between Luke Skywalker and Jesus Christ, in person he demonstrates a studied conscientiousness. Radcliffe talks at a machine gun clip, and never, ever gets tripped up when answering a question. He has spent most of his life thinking about Potter — he was cast as Harry at 11, and is now 33 — and he is excessively familiar with what that means to people. “You just grow up with a sense of like, ‘Okay, people are aware of me, and I need to think about that,’” he says. “And eventually it becomes easier to adapt to.”
Jeremy Gordon
Source link