By Gill Pringle
What did you think when you first read the script? “I never read a full script actually. I met with [co-director] Nicholas Stoller, the producers, and the animators. They showed me a rough animatic of a chunk of it, and I was pretty much just down to do it based on the fact that it was Stoller. I really liked his work. [The LEGO Movie directors] Phil Lord and Chris Miller were executive producers, and they’re my buddies. They make great stuff.”
Did you make up the song that you sing in the film? “It was Stoller. He helped me get there.”
Are you obliged to sing in everything you do? “Usually people want me to rap. It was a nice change of pace for me to sing.”
Are you going to be doing a song for The LEGO Batman Movie? “Not yet, but maybe. Oh, not for The LEGO Batman Movie, no. I think that’s already done, isn’t it?”
No guest appearance in it? “I wasn’t asked. I had to settle for doing Storks [Laughs].”
Do you like to split your work between more adult things and kids’ things? “I like both; it’s really fun. I liked working with Stoller on this, and Hotel Transylvania with Adam Sandler. We’re all like-minded in terms of comedy. It’s fun to make something that everybody can watch, but at the core of it, it’s still unrelenting silliness.”
You were a sausage in Sausage Party, were you not? “No, not asked, thanks for bringing it up [Laughs].”
What’s your take on your character in Storks? “One of the most interesting things about it is the classically male sense of ambition that Junior has without having any understanding of why. Like, ‘I’ll be the boss! I’m gonna be successful!’ But as soon as Tulip is like, ‘But why?’ he completely becomes unreeled and flipped out because you’re told that that’s the path that you’re supposed to take. So you take that path, and then you look up one day and say, ‘Why? What did I do? Why didn’t I have more fun?’”
We’re in Australia so we have to ask you about Hugh Jackman, who is one of the people that you impersonate… “Oh yeah, really spot on [Laughs].”
What has Hugh Jackman’s reaction been to it? “He did it with me. He came onto Saturday Night Live and did it with me. The joke was initially around Saturday Night Live that my Australian accent was so atrocious that I would do it and say that I was Hugh Jackman. It was nothing to do with Hugh Jackman…it’s a long story. Basically it started with that news item of him zip-lining and going through the wall [on Oprah’s Australian show]. So then I wrote a Weekend Update feature where they were like, ‘Here comes Hugh Jackman’ and I was like [Australian accent] ‘Let’s get ready to party.’ Then I’d zip line through and blow up the wall at the back of the update desk. They were like, ‘There’s no way we’re doing that.’ So me and my friends wrote a Hugh Jackman show sketch…that’s how you get anything on Saturday Night Live – add the word ‘show’ at the end. Throughout it, I keep commenting on how spot on my accent is, even though I’m supposed to be him. He saw it and I bumped into him at a Nicks game in New York. I was like, ‘Oh god, I hope he doesn’t want to kill me.’ But he loved it because it was so dumb. He came on and played Daniel Radcliffe. So it ended up being a moment of like him as Radcliffe, with me as him next to him, and both us of us talking about how we were very clearly who we were playing even though both of us were way off.”
Did he give you any tips on how to be more like him? “Not really. I think he was like, ‘Be more handsome! [Laughs].”
Who is your favourite Saturday Night Live cast member of all time? “It’s really hard for me to pick.”
Top three? “Gilda Radner, Will Ferrell, and then a tie between Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, Phil Hartman [laughs], Amy Poehler…I love so many of them.”
There used to be so many movies that came from SNL characters. Are there any characters that you’d love to make a movie out of? “There were whispers once of doing a ‘Dick in a Box’ movie, but it never came together. It would’ve been fun. I’d like to do a Laser Cats movie, and make it for like $10.”
How do you apply for a job at Saturday Night Live? “It’s a million different ways. For me specifically, it was when me [and my writing/comedy partners], Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone were writing for The MTV Movie Awards. Jimmy Fallon was the host, and he brought a bunch of the producers and writers with him to help out, and then we all became friends. So then they recommended us to [SNL main man] Lorne Michaels. So it was kind of by chance. But I had done a lot of stand up and we’d shot a couple of pilots and we had a website with videos on it. We had stuff that they could point to and say, ‘Oh, you might wanna give these guys a shot.’”
Do you remember how you felt before doing your first stand-up? “Yeah, it was in college in New York. Me and my buddy, Murray Miller, decided to do it together for the first time. It was a bringer show, so you had to convince people to come and pay a lot of money. We had a couple of beers and it went pretty well. I can’t remember all the jokes that I did, but I remember that I did a joke about a skit on the Janet Jackson album which had just come out where her friend calls her and she picks up the phone and she’s pleasuring herself [laughs]. The whole joke was like a dudes-should-never-do-that sketch. I was Janet for that sketch.”
What advice would you give to a young person wanting to get into comedy? “If you want to do comedy, just start doing comedy. It’s just like any other profession – you have to get good at it. You might be born with an inclination or a natural ability, but you have to hone it and work hard and do the 10,000 hours or whatever. Don’t wait for anyone else to give you permission to start doing it, just do it. And write. That’s the one thing that I tell everybody. Definitely write, because you control your own destiny if you’re a writer.”
Storks is released in cinemas on September 22.
