The Weird Al biopic almost featured time travel and multiverses
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Most biopics pride themselves on their veracity, pointing out that, say, 98 percent of what happens onscreen really did occur in real-life. (Lately, they even show you the real people in the credits.) That's not the case with Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. "It's flipped," says director Eric Appel. "It's 98 percent fiction and two percent fact."
Everett Collection Daniel Radcliffe in 'Weird: The Al Yankovic Story'
Weird stars Daniel Radcliffe as a whacked-out version of the titular pop parodist who succumbs to a variety of rock-star temptations, tangles with late drug lord Pablo Escobar, and dates a similarly divorced-from-reality representation of Madonna, played by Evan Rachel Wood. Remarkably, the movie was almost weirder still.
"I think at one point I may have pitched time travel or meeting multiple versions of Al from different universes," says Appel, who wrote the film's script with Yankovic. "That was a little too far. Maybe we'll do a sequel. We can use some of those crazier ideas."
Weird began life as a spoof trailer which Appel directed for the Funny Or Die website back in 2010. In that iteration, Aaron Paul played Yankovic and Olivia Wilde portrayed Madonna while Yankovic was cast as a record company executive.
"It was right after the Notorious B.I.G. biopic had come out," says Appel, about Notorious, the inspiration behind the short. "Typically, at that time, biopics were about someone who had been dead for, you know, 25 years. The Biggie movie felt like those events had just happened. I was reading an article about factual inaccuracies in that movie, because it was such a fresh story, and I got thinking about how all biopics are kind of like that. They take events that happened over the course of years, sometimes, and cram them into one scene for dramatic purposes. I thought it would be funny to make a fake biopic trailer about someone who was not only still alive but then to completely fabricate the story in a ridiculous way."
Being a longtime Yankovic fan, Appel soon alighted on the notion of making "Weird Al" the subject of his fake trailer.
"It works on a meta-level, because he's the king of parodies and it's a parody itself, and also I know that his life is kind of squeaky clean," Appel says. "I reached out to Patton Oswalt, who I knew was friends with Al, just to get Al's blessing. It felt like an idea that he might want to do himself, so I'm like, 'I just want to make sure he's cool with me doing this.' Much to my surprise, that evening, I was having coffee with Weird Al, who wanted to collaborate with me on it. I'd never met him before. I'd been a huge fan my whole life, and suddenly we're sitting in a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard watching biopic trailers on a laptop and taking notes of all of our favorite tropes we wanted to make fun of."
Fast forward, biopic-style, nine years. In the intervening time, Yankovic had taken to showing the spoof trailer at his concerts while Appel carved out a career as a writer and director of sitcoms, overseeing episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Silicon Valley, as well as co-creating Fox's Son of Zorn. Appel always believed that his short could be turned into a movie but felt that it was up to Yankovic to pull the trigger on taking the project further.
"The ball was in Al's court," he says. "If at any point in those years, he had rang me up and said, 'Do you want to make this a movie?' I would have jumped at it. It didn't happen until 2019. I got a random email from him one February morning. Al was trying to figure out what he was going to do next. He had just released this career retrospective box set and he was like, 'I've been playing this trailer at my concerts for 10 years. People come up to me after the show, they ask me, 'Is this movie real? I want to see this!' Bohemian Rhapsody had come out. Rocket Man was about to come out. With biopics back in the zeitgeist, Al was like, 'How would you feel about turning this trailer into a movie?' The next morning we were sitting in a coffee shop coming up with ideas."
The Roku Channel Evan Rachel Wood and Daniel Radcliffe in 'Weird: The Al Yankovic Story'
Appel was determined to recruit actors for the roles of Yankovic and Madonna who could play their roles at least reasonably straight regardless of how goofy things got onscreen. That led him to the respective doors of Radcliffe and Wood, both of whom proved receptive to the project.
"We had sent the script to Dan's reps and a week later Al and I were on a Zoom with him and he was like, 'I want to do this,'" says Appel. "By the end of the phone call, he was asking Al what kind of accordion to buy. He was like, 'I'm going to practice learning accordion just in case this movie gets greenlit eventually!' [Laughs] Evan saw an email from her agent that said, 'You're being requested to play Madonna in a movie,' and the way she puts it is, 'When do you ever get that email? Of course I'm going to do this!'" (Appel says he has yet to hear what Madonna herself thinks of the film but thinks she would like it: "Evan plays a very fun version of Madonna. Like, Evan doesn't play the real Madonna, she plays like the idea of Madonna, or what conservative parents thought Madonna wa probably like in the '80s.")
In addition to the two lead actors, the cast of Weird features Rainn Wilson as Yankovic's mentor Dr. Demento, Jack Black as the disc jockey Wolfman Jack, and Yankovic himself, reprising his record label boss role from the Funny of Die short. So what is it like to direct Yankovic in a Yankovic biopic?
"Uh, weird, for lack of a better term," says Appel. "It was really fun directing him and Dan in the same scene together. You'd come on set, and you'd give a note, 'Okay, Al, I have a thought,' and two heads turn and look at you."
Theo Wargo/Getty Images Eric Appel, director of 'Weird: The Al Yankovic Story'
Appel's film received its world premiere at this year's Toronto International Film Festival and, according to the director, has proven a hit with fans and non-fans alike.
"It's been incredibly well received," he says. "We screened it in Mexico City a week ago, and I talked to several people who loved it as just a biopic parody, and really knew nothing about Weird Al."
Now that's weird.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is now available to watch on the Roku Channel. Watch the film's trailer below.
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