“Weird Al” Yankovic and Daniel Radcliffe are huge fans of each other.
While promoting his new biopic, Weird: The Story of Al Yankovicthe award-winning artist became candid about why he Harry Potter actor to play him and said he had “the right energy for it”.
“I’m a big fan of Dan. He does great dramatic acting and great comedic acting, and he gets it,” Yankovic . said The Hollywood Reporter. “I mean, I knew he was a huge comedy fan. He’s a huge nerd, just like me, and I knew he would really tap into the tone we were going for in this movie, which is so important.”
It wasn’t all that important to Yankovic that Radcliffe wasn’t an “exact physical doppelganger” because the movie is meant to be a parody of biopics, and it was more important for the star to be able to understand that than to look exactly like it. main character.
“I just thought he would really be able to capture the spirit of the character we wrote for the film,” he says.
Radcliffe didn’t realize it Weird: The Story of Al Yankovic was supposed to be a parody until he started reading the script. When he first got it, he wasn’t sure why he was asked to read for this role.
“I was already a huge ‘Weird Al’ fan, and I was confused as to why they would ask me to play him in a movie of his life, because I thought, ‘I don’t look much like him,'” Radcliffe tells THR. “But then I read it, and I thought, ‘Oh, right. It’s good. We’re not doing that. We’re doing something else, and it doesn’t matter.’”
However, it didn’t take him long to realize that there’s nothing that a “Weird Al” biopic could be any different than a parody of biopics.
“Seeing that and seeing how well they would have loved to make that joke, and then talk to them and say, ‘Yeah, Eric Appel is beautiful. Even though it seems beautiful to me,'” says Radcliffe. “You just want to make a movie with these guys. .”
Weird: The Story of Al Yankovic is now streaming for free on Roku.
