WEIRD: Playing Madonna Had Evan Rachel Wood Terrified

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story puts Daniel Radcliffe and Evan Rachel Wood into some big shoes. These two actors talented with legends of their own but for Roku’s Weird move, they had to embody a couple of real life legends other than themselves. For a story which can only be told in such a zany form as the shape Weird takes throughout its hugely entertaining runtime, Radcliffe channels his inner Weird Al opposite Wood’s Madonna. This meant Wood was popping bubble gum and giving Pablo Escobar a run for his money… quite literally. 

When it comes down to it, portraying such a wild version of Madonna was enough to the Westworld star quite a bit nervous. ComicBook.com asked Wood if any parts of her Madonna role in Weird made her wonder what Madonna might think, to which she quickly revealed, “all of it,” had raised such fears. 

“The second I opened my mouth, you know, she’s so iconic,” Wood said. “It’s just not something you wanna mess up, even in a, you know, a comedy. And so I told Eric [Appel], the director, when I was sent the script and they cast me, I was like, ‘I want you to know that I’m going to give you my best Madonna. Like, I’m fully committing to this, I’m doing my research, and I’m gonna make it as good as I can in this setting.’ And, you know, it was also less pressure because the wheels fly off, and we get to sort of be very heightened versions of these people and it’s not really true. So that, that helped. But no, I took it very serious.”

The film sees Wood’s Madonna become romantically involved with Radcliffe’s Yankovic. Chaos ensues as Al loses sight of what he has wanted throughout his life and gets caught up in the rockstar lifestyle with Madonna serving as the gateway drug to it all. With a 92% review score on RottenTomatoes for its Tomato Meter debut, Weird‘s chaotic story is clearly quite entertaining and the cast has put together something wildly entertaining. 

After spending so much time together on set, Wood shared some memories of seeing Radcliffe bring Weird Al songs to life. “I just remember every time you had to perform a song in the movie, that would be stuck in everybody’s head for the next, I wanna say week,” Wood said to Radcliffe, as seen in the video at the top of the page. “We didn’t have them much time to shoot, but like it would just be, so when you did, ‘Like a Surgeon,’ that suddenly was the one I just could not stop singing and getting out of my head.”

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is available now on The Roku Channel, a service available as an app on any smart TV, Roku device, Amazon Firestick, and iOS or Android devices. Are you excited to watch it? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Twitter!