How Weird: The Al Yankovic Story Landed Those Incredible Cameos
The post How Weird: The Al Yankovic Story Landed Those Incredible Cameos appeared first on Consequence.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is packed with more cameos than you can count on first viewing, as the “Weird” Al Yankovic-style approach to creating a musical biopic (i.e. — a parody of biopics) was able to lean heavily on the iconic musician’s address book to bring in big names.
“All of the ridiculously famous legends came from Weird Al, but it was really fun, going out to all those people,” director Eric Appel tells Consequence. “It was Al personally reaching out to all of them, just showing me this list and saying ‘Hey, here’s all these people that are on my holiday card list — pick from them, I can call them personally.”
Appel’s initial engagement with Yankovic began in 2013, when he made a trailer version of Weird as a Funny or Die exclusive — leaning hard into the tropes of dark and gritty biopics, the “trailer” starred Aaron Paul as Weird Al, Olivia Wilde as Madonna, Patton Oswalt as Dr. Demento, and Yankovic himself as a clueless record executive.
The path from the original trailer to a film that won a People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival involved Appel and Yankovic collaborating on a feature-length script, before attaching Daniel Radcliffe to play the famed star. Much like the trailer (but with some key differences), the film depicts young Al becoming a huge star, romancing Madonna (played here by Evan Rachel Wood), and falling into a life of drugs, debauchery, and violence.
Radcliffe’s commitment to the role is absolute, but Appel hadn’t forgotten about his previous star, and there were plans in place for Aaron Paul to make a cameo in the film as a heckler at one of Weird Al’s early shows. Appel says the cameo was inspired by Johnny Depp’s very secretive cameo in 21 Jump Street: “We were going to give him a big beard, because I wanted to make him look like a biker, and for people to say, ‘Wait a second, was that Aaron Paul?’ Or for people to see his name in the credits and have to go back and say, ‘Oh my God, that was Aaron Paul.'”
Unfortunately, this pandemic you might have heard something about got in the way. “He showed up for his fitting and unfortunately tested positive for COVID, and it was such a bummer,” Appel says. (Paul, in an interview with CinemaBlend, said that “I was just out for like 10 solid days. I have never felt more sick in my life. And so we couldn’t do the cameo, which I just absolutely was crushed about.”)
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (The Roku Channel)
Paul’s absence did lead to an interesting bit of musical chairs, cameo-wise: Due to a foot injury, Oswalt had been unable to return as Dr. Demento for the film, but he was able to fill in as the biker character Paul would have played. “It was nice to get Patton in there with a broken foot — he was on a knee scooter, but he wanted so badly to come do anything in the movie,” Appel says. (Knowing this, you’ll understand why Oswalt is only seen in close-up during the scene.)
Another cameo Appel was excited to secure was Michael McKean, whose long and eclectic career includes, of course, co-writing and starring in This Is Spinal Tap. “It was incredible to have him there, and I’ve watched it with people and I’m like looking at them when he comes on screen and yeah, sometimes they don’t know it until the second time you see him,” he says. “But it was so great to have such a music comedy legend like himself in this music comedy biopic.”
Again, there are so many cameos in this movie — on his own, Appel brought in Johnny Pemberton (21 Jump Street, Superstore) and Jonah Ray (Mystery Science Theater 3000) as members of a punk rock band Weird Al auditions to join. And there’s one scene, set at a pool party, which features a metric ton of notable comedians playing various celebrities from the world of music and beyond.
“Akiva [Schaffer] from The Lonely Island is Alice Cooper,” Appel mentions as one example. “And he has no dialogue in the movie — that was his idea. He was like, ‘I want to come out and do something. I don’t even want any lines.’ I’m like, ‘All right, that’s great.’ He gave me some great reactions.”
But for the pool party scene — for the whole shoot, in fact — Appel did not have much time. “The movie was shot in 18 days, so [the pool party] was one day at that house. And that wasn’t just the full day, because we also shot a scene in Dr. Demento’s office with Al, Madonna, and Demento that same day,” he says.
“It was 18 proper, no overtime, days. God, to shoot [the pool scene] in four hours, when you take into account how long it took all of those people to get ready and into costumes, and we kind of staggered them and we were losing the sun, it was February, it was cold… There were supposed to be people in the pool, but it was too cold to put people in the pool, even with a heater. The logistics behind that day — it’s a miracle that we even got everything in the cameras. But I’m so thrilled with how it all shook out, and how people are receiving it.”
One fun fact is that over the course of the film, two of the songs that Yankovic has parodied over the years can be heard in their original form: The Knack’s “My Sharona” and Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” But, Appel says, “for all of the parody songs, we had to get the rights to the original song in order to have the parody in the movie. So, I think with any of them, we could have played the original version of the song as well, somewhere, but we just didn’t. I mean, I think it would’ve probably cost quite a bit more. But it didn’t make sense for the story.”
As for the story, Appel says that the key to expanding the original trailer for a feature-length project was to not feel “beholden by the beats of that trailer. There are moments from that original fake trailer that we made that ended up in the movie because they made sense for the story, and we were trying to reverse-engineer the trailer into the movie a little bit more at first. And we just decided that it was better to take all those familiar story beats that happen in a biopic and just craft our own bonkers original story. Our willingness to move away from it and use it as a jumping-off point to come up with something fresh and original helped.”
Appel was receptive to a pitch I had — that at some point Yankovic might “disown” Weird, declaring it to be an unauthorized retelling of his life story. “That would be really funny,” he says. “And then we make another one that’s like, ‘This is the true story’ — and it’s another totally fake story.”
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story premieres Friday, November 4th on the Roku Channel. (What’s the Roku Channel, you ask? Here’s a guide on how to watch the film.) ADD LINK
How Weird: The Al Yankovic Story Landed Those Incredible Cameos
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