I was watching the last in the current series of the excellent Friday Night with Jonathon Ross here on UK’s BBC TV channel, and one of his guests was the equally funny Ricky Gervais. Boy, those two together are funny.
Gervais talked of his new show Extras and we were treated to a sneak preview where Kate Winslet was playing a Nun fighting against the Nazi’s during World War II. Gervais’ character confronted her about getting a line and the conversation turned round to her motives for doing the movie. “Raising awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust?” he asked, “No, getting an Oscar. Every movie about the Holocaust get’s an Oscar, so the way I see it is I’m guaranteed one.” I’m paraphrasing of course, and you can see what the show was trying to do, but to be quite frank it wasn’t funny. I’m sure there are more clips that are, and that they just chose a bum one.
What was interesting about the interview was Gervais saying that he hated his performance in Alias. He said that he didn’t think comedians can do straight acting, it just didn’t work. He went on to say that the role in Mission: Impossible III was just getting too big for him. He did reveal that he is entering Hollywood though and that scheduling had a lot to play in the turning down of the role. He’ll be in the next Christopher Guest movie. From Film Rotation:
Details of the project are said to be closely guarded but rumour has it, it will involve a documentary crew following an actor and his “entourage” from the point of completing a movie right up to his campaigning to win an Academy Award for said role, despite the fact that it wasn’t a worthy performance.
Guest’s movies are superb, I loved the bizareness of Best in Show and it sounds like this has so much scope for another excellent satire of the documentary and the people within it. Gervais is just perfect for something like this, after all that’s what The Office was all about.
