Daniel Radcliffe has been performing for most of his life, and many fans know him best for playing Harry Potter. The actor also has some history with musicals, previously starring in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on Broadway and in the upcoming off-Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along. This weekend, you can watch him play musical icon Weird Al in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. ComicBook.com recently had the chance to talk with many of the folks involved with the “biopic,” and it was revealed that Radcliffe actually performed Weird Al’s songs on the set.
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“It was great,” director Eric Appel said about watching Radcliffe perform. “He’s a great singer. He’s been on Broadway and I mean he nailed it. It helped him to sing along on set, just to sync up with the prerecorded tracks. But like, his voice is great and I did karaoke with him after we wrapped and heard him sing some Weird Al songs there. And you gotta hear the Daniel Radcliffe rendition of ‘White and Nerdy.’”
“He’s so committed to this character,” Rainn Wilson (Dr. Demento) shared. “He learned accordion, he learned all the songs, he sang along, he gave it everything. And I just love that about him. And, you couldn’t have done it any other way. It’s really fantastic.”
“I just remember every time [Daniel Radcliffe] had to perform a song in the movie, that would be stuck in everybody’s head for the next, I wanna say week, but we didn’t have them much time to shoot, but like it would just be… So, when [Radcliffe] did ‘Like a Surgeon,’ that suddenly was the one I just could not stop singing and getting out of my head,” Evan Rachel Wood (Madonna) revealed.
ComicBook.com also asked Appel if he had a favorite Weird Al song.
“I always say, my favorite song, my favorite Weird Al song, little bit of a deep cut, it’s ‘The White Stuff’ which is the New Kids on the Block parody about Oreo cookies from Off the Deep End, which was like the album I got when I was in sixth grade. That’s like the prime get-into Weird Al age for a kid, I think. And I was just so obsessed with it. And yeah, so that’s always held a special place in my heart. As far as like in the movie, I mean, God, I love it, I’ve heard the songs so many times, I know them better than I ever knew them before,” Appel explained.
He continued, “But I will say the coolest thing for me was Al recorded all new versions of these songs, specifically for the movie. So I got to like go in the studio with him and his band and listen to them record these songs and give notes on one specific one. There’s a Doors-like moment in the movie which was just insane … Al’s sending me, the craziest was him emailing me the mixes of these new songs and he was like, ‘You’re the first person to hear these.’ And I was like sitting on the couch with my wife and I’m like, ‘I willed these songs into existence. I’m the first person hearing these new Weird Al tracks?’”
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story begins streaming on The Roku Channel on November 4th.
