“Weird Al” Yankovic has made a lot of friends. Toiling away in show business for 40 years will do that, especially when you do a lot of critically ignored but publicly beloved work. Late-night talk show hosts and musical theater icons will sing your praises on national TV while podcast presenters and underground comedy icons will wax rhapsodic about you to the Los Angeles Times, wondering aloud why you don’t have a Peabody Award just yet.
Indeed, in an industry where everyone acts like your friend and few are, the pop parody icon was able to pull together a murderer’s row of talent for Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Dropping today on the Roku Channel, the movie is very, very loosely based on the accordion player’s life and stars one of his most bold-faced pals, Daniel Radcliffe, in the title role.
The film also marks a big return to cinema for Yankovic, who starred in 1989’s UHF and has been, by his own admission, gun-shy ever since. UHF is a cult classic now, but at the time it was a commercial failure. Being on a streaming service takes off the pressure of worrying about opening weekend box office numbers. “In my first email to [Weird director and cowriter Eric Appel] when we decided to work on the movie I said, ‘I don't want to come back after 33 years and have another box office bomb,’” Yankovic says.
Not that getting on a streamer was easy. Yankovic and Appel actually pitched it to quite a few services, but only one bit. “Eric and I had written a really good, funny, smart screenplay and Daniel Radcliffe was attached, so we thought, ‘There’s going to be a bidding war,’” Yankovic says. “Nobody wanted to whip out their checkbooks except for Roku.”
In Weird, Radcliffe plays Yankovic as a tortured artist kept away from the accordion as a child and mostly ignored until he stumbles on a funny little song about lunchmeat. He’s spurned by the music establishment, of course, but the artsy underground falls in love with him—as does Madonna—and Movie Al ends up becoming mega-famous, mega-drunk, and mega-dickish as he struggles to find his place in the world. There are run-ins with Pablo Escobar, inspirational medical emergencies, and awards aplenty before the movie is out.
While large chunks of the movie aren’t based on actual events, it’s still very much set in real Hollywood in the real 1980s, a time and place crawling with megastars, many of them played in Weird by other megastars. (Conan O'Brien plays Andy Warhol, for example.) This is where Yankovic’s Rolodex of friends came in handy. WIRED talked to him about how he landed all those famous faces—and the ones he wasn’t able to lock down.
WIRED: In Weird, there’s a big pool party scene at Dr. Demento’s house with a cavalcade of alternative icons and cult celebrities like Divine and Andy Warhol, most played by actors and comedians we all know and love. As a producer, how did you help pull that scene together?
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“Weird Al” Yankovic: I just went through my address book and emailed a bunch of people. I was looking for people who happened to be in town and available on that particular day and who were very happy to drive to Tarzana.
Did you get everyone you reached out to?
There were a few that didn't work out exactly as I had originally intended. In the original script, in the pool party scene, it was supposed to be me being confronted by Freddie Mercury, but that was the one stipulation that the Queen estate had when we talked to them about using “Another One Rides the Bus” in the movie. They said we couldn’t mention or show Freddie Mercury, like in my movie Freddie Mercury just cannot exist. That was their one thing.
Because of that, we said, “Well, we'll make the joke about the other three guys from Queen and we'll have the Lonely Island come in and be the other three guys from Queen.” As it turned out, Andy Samberg chose to reproduce that month, so he was not available. But both Jorma [Taccone] and Akiva [Schaffer] wanted to be in the movie, so Jorma plays Pee-wee Herman and Akiva plays Alice Cooper. [Eds. note: David Dastmalchian ended up playing Queen bassist John Deacon in the final film.]
I don’t feel horrible mentioning this because he alluded to it on The Tonight Show, but Lin-Manuel Miranda also has a cameo in the movie, though you don’t really know it’s him until you do. Was that a conscious reveal moment?
Well, I'm glad it worked out that way. When I first announced in February that I was doing the movie, within minutes I got a text from Lin-Manuel saying, “What do you want me to do in it?” I was gonna approach him anyway, but the fact that he jumped at the chance was really cool.
I told him, “Let me know when you're gonna be in LA and we'll figure it out.” He told me the one day he was going to be in LA, and I looked at our production schedule and said, “OK, he can be the doctor.” It’s very cool, because it’s the first scene in the movie and the first big reveal, and it gets a big laugh.
Paul F. Tompkins’ cameo is great because he plays Gallagher, so he gets to smash a watermelon. How did he land that role? Is it just because he sort of looks like Gallagher if you squint?
Partly. I mean, I love Paul, and I'm glad we got a chance to have him in the movie, but Gallagher wasn’t in the script originally. I think he might have been a last-minute add-on, because originally we had Cheech and Chong in the scene, and then we had some problems with that for whatever reason, so we added Gallagher and immediately thought, “Oh, Paul F. Tompkins, of course.”
Quinta Brunson plays Oprah, which seems right considering how popular she’s getting. How do you know her?
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That came from casting. I didn't have Quinta’s email in my address book, but I could not be happier. Quinta was a sweetheart, and she absolutely nailed it. I'm just so thrilled that she's part of this crazy movie.
Speaking of the original short, some of the people from that clip carried over their roles, but others, like Aaron Paul, who played you, didn’t. What was the thinking there?
Back when Eric and I first thought of doing the movie, we thought, “Let’s just get the original cast from the trailer and just do the movie for real with the original people.”
Aaron wasn't really interested at the time, because he was more focused on dramatic work, but he was kind enough to agree to do a cameo in the movie. Actually, Aaron was originally going to be the heckler in the biker bar instead of Patton Oswalt. It’s like musical chairs, casting-wise, but that was going to be Aaron.
But then Paul showed up to the set and he tested positive for Covid. He was our one Covid casualty. He got sent home, and he told me he was the sickest he'd ever been in his life for the next 10 days. I felt really bad about that, and I'm sure he did too, but that’s how we missed getting our Aaron Paul cameo.
Rainn Wilson plays Dr. Demento, someone who was such an important figure in your life. Was it hard to cast his celebrity impersonator?
Originally it was going to be Patton Oswalt, because he was in the original comedy short we made that became the inspiration for the movie. He's a close friend, but literally the week before Patton was due to be onset he broke his foot in three places.
Eric and I were thinking, “Should we have Dr. Demento on crutches? Could we always have him in a chair?” But then we thought, “No, Demento actually needs to be mobile so he can walk through scenes.”
I emailed Rainn with, I think, three days’ notice and said, “Do you want to star in my movie?” We knew he would nail it. And he had a beard at the time, which was helpful.