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