The Masked Singer: How the Eagle fooled his old colleague Jenny McCarthy
Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Masked Singer.
Aww, the Eagle barely had a chance to take flight!
On Wednesday, the Eagle — a.k.a. celebrity doctor Drew Pinsky, 61 — was sent home on The Masked Singer after taking the stage along with Flower, Fox, and Penguin. We talked to the radio personality about how well he commanded the stage in such a short amount of time and how he felt lucky that his old MTV colleague Jenny McCarthy didn’t immediately recognize him.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So what was going on with your pacing? Nick Cannon couldn’t control you.
DREW PINSKY: There’s a couple of things. One, you have producers going, “Be the Eagle, be the Eagle. Be younger, be more rock and roll. Be wilder.” I said okay, I’m going to go for it. And I did a lot more than you saw on the show. Nick’s concern was that I couldn’t see ’cause most of those costumes make it so you really just can’t see anything. But I had pretty good vision. I could see everything on the floor.
That costume made you particularly tall. How tall are you?
Six feet. That’s why they were saying Howard Stern. That’s also why my legs look so small and spinely.
They really did. So once again, the clues seemed easy, especially with your decision to sing Meatloaf’s “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).” What did you think?
They do a pretty good job with keeping the clues bland enough that you’re not giving anything away, but it was enough to get Jenny McCarthy very close.
When did you work with Jenny?
Her show Singled Out used to follow Loveline in 1996. We have been together for over 20 years and I’ve known her ever since. We have worked together on many things over the years. And then Ken used to sit in with me on Loveline before The Hangover, when he was a practicing physician. I knew him. Nobody else knew him. That was another part you didn’t see on television, him saying to me, “I used to sit in on your show.”
Back in the day, did Jenny and Ken know that you could sing opera?
No, and that was part of the reason why I did the show. There are great sellers on the show. It’s a vocal competition, but the other part is guessing. People who don’t normally sing are out there in costume playing a character. That’s fun. That’s interesting.
How long have you studied opera?
I started in college and right now, I’m losing my voice. Right when I took this show, I started singing again and my middle range was just gone. So I ended up going to an ear, nose, and throat doctor and lo and behold, I had hemorrhage on my vocal cord. I got [that] corrected. But then I needed laser on my vocal cord…which we didn’t have time to do. So I was left with three-quarters of my voice. But The Masked Singer has a group of vocal rehab people who really helped me out.
Is there a way to teach yourself not to sound so operatic?
They tried. There were weeks of trying. It took a lot of retraining.
I got the impression that the judges thought you were doing it as a joke.
That kind of singing? Yeah. They were picking up that there was something wrong with my voice. They even said something like that did not go on TV, that it was some sort of operatic production. But it was a rock song.
When did the producers approach you?
They didn’t approach me. I was sitting at breakfast with my agent one day and I was complaining about something. I said, “Why don’t you put me on that show? I can do that.” And he went, “Oh yeah, let’s do that.” The next day I was on the phone with the producers.
How did you land on the Eagle?
So one of the first conversations I had with the producers is about the costume. They asked me to think about it and, you know, I sing national anthems at the Dodger games and the Kings games. I was thinking anthems, maybe Sinatra or Bublé. Like maybe a bald eagle singing American anthems. When I got there they immediately said to me before I said anything, “I’m thinking about you being an eagle.” I was like, well, perfect. Then I kept going down the path of, you know, God bless the USA until I put the eagle costume on. And then I thought, “Oh no, this is a rock eagle.” We started it all over again. At first I was going to sing Def Leppard. We were going full rock.
Did you pick “I’d Do Anything for Love”?
I was not even familiar with it. It was really a stretch for me. I wanted to sing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
This is your first competition reality show. So is Dancing With the Stars next?
Well, I do sing and you see that didn’t work out so well. I don’t dance, so God knows what would happen with that. I had so much fun and the production was so high quality and such a great group. It certainly makes the experience of doing something like that again enticing, but I dunno. Maybe they should call me. We can talk about it.
The Masked Singer airs Wednesdays on Fox.
Related content:
