Rio

[size=200:s8mufhz6]Jemaine Clement Talks Rio 2, Big Beards And David Bowie
The Flight Of The Conchordian checks in with Empire


Jemaine Clement: musician, actor, comedian, David Bowie enthusiast and one of the best known New Zealanders in the world. Also, the voice of Nigel, an evil cockatoo in the first Rio movie and now its sequel, Rio 2, which sees the flightless fowl still chasing after Jesse Eisenberg’s Blu and Anne Hathaway’s Jewel as they head deep into the Amazon rainforest. It’s been a while since the internet’s been blessed with a lengthy text interview with Clement, so here’s your latest update. “Thanks for checking up on me!” he says. “How am I doing? How am I feeling? Where do I live? I have no idea.”


What have you been up to lately?
Ah, right, yes. I’ve been touring festivals with (director, screenwriter and comedian) Taika Waititi. We made a film in New Zealand, and now we’re doing the final version and we’re going to release that. There’s a little bit of tweaking still left to do. It’s called What We Do In The Shadows, and it’s a mockumentary about vampires. Empire readers! Spell my name right and do a Google search and you’ll find stuff about that.

What’s the worst way anyone has pronounced your name?
When I went to university, in my first year I was called 'Jerome' every day. Every single day it would happen once. I thought to myself, “I’m going to have to be famous to stop this from happening.” It... it hasn't helped much. I was so sick of people saying my name wrong, I had to be famous.

Slightly honestly, I started this comedy duo with Taika Waititi, and we made sure it was called “Taika And Jemaine: Humourbeasts”. We always put out names on so people wouldn’t mess them up! (Laughs) Slightly serious, though. If people call you names, get famous, it might help.

Your character in Rio and Rio 2, Nigel, is a sulphur-crested cockatoo, which is not found in New Zealand, but in Australia (and parts of New Guinea). Were you ever told to do an Aussie accent in the first movie?
No, but I did try one. I tried it for a while, actually. In fact, there are sentences in the first one where they’ve used some slightly Aussie takes, as well as one more English, and one more out-and-out New Zealand. There are definitely a couple of places where I can distinctly hear I was going for the Aussie accent. They don’t notice, because they’re American, but I notice. Die-hard fans can now listen out for moments I tried out my other accents.

What’s the easiest way to do a New Zealand accent?
Don’t worry about using vowels. Abort vowels. They’re all basically the same – the noise you’d make if someone slapped you on the back: “Uh!” So, “Wuh uhll guhing tuh thuh uhpuht” is “We’re all going to the airport.” Actually South African and New Zealand are quite similar, so be careful there.

When was the last time you saw Bret?
A while. But it’s not like I’ve been avoiding him, he’s just been busy. Probably on my birthday, in January. At my house in Wellington.

Where you in any way jealous that he got to be in The Hobbit and you didn't?
No! I was glad he got it. I was jealous of everyone else. (Laughs) It’s good, because he’s my friend, so one of us got in. Of our group of friends, I mean. I turned up to the audition, and even before I started saying my lines, they said, “How tall are you?” I said, “Six foot one.” They said, “You’re too tall. Do it anyway…” (Laughs) I should point out that I auditioned for a Hobbit part. I’m too big for an elf, they’re all very lean. Now they get tall people as dwarves, but they didn't then. Now they have more power with CGI and perspective.

During the press tour for the first Rio movie, you had a gigantic beard. How did you keep it so resplendent?
Ah yes, that was because I was shooting Man In Black 3 and they basically didn’t let me groom. If you leave my chin be, that is what happens. I’m not lying when I tell you this, but one time, when I had that big beard, a homeless person laughed at my face. “Get a haircut!”, he was shouting. I had really long hair, and a long beard, and I guess I looked pretty crazy. I had a paparazzi incident that day. If you check it out, I look mental.

What’s your comeback to a homeless man who tells you to get a haircut?
I was like, “I can’t get a haircut, I’m in Men In Black 3 and they won’t let me. Sony is forbidding me to get a haircut. What are you doing? What movies are you going to be in?” But he was better dressed than me. Better groomed than I was too. Honestly.

What are your thoughts on Bowie’s latest album, The Next Day?
I’ve been listening to it. I find that people often disparage his new stuff when it comes out, but when they listen to it again in 20 years they’ll say, “That’s really good.” The late ‘90s, particularly. Was it ‘Hours...’? At the time, I heard everyone saying it was crap, therefore I also thought it was crap, but I listen to it now as it’s got some really great songs on it. ‘Thursday’s Child’ and ‘Seven’ in particular, I really love those songs. So this means in 20 years The Next Day will be my favourite album ever.

How close have you ever been to David Bowie?
I have never seen him or met him. But I went to a David Bowie concert in Wellington! Metres away. Though the seats weren’t that great. But it was an interesting day because our flat got broken into and two things were stolen: my guitar and my David Bowie concert tickets. That was devastating. Then we rang up, and they said we didn't need the tickets, just the card they were bought with. That was a relief.

So we turned up and two people were sitting in our seats. It was funny because this guy’s girlfriend was saying, “These are our seats, right?” And the boyfriend said, “Well, um, let’s… just go check.” He must have known the tickets were hot. He must have bought them off some guy, because no-one would have had the balls to have stolen the tickets from me then go to the actual gig with his girlfriend, right?

But Bowie was legendary that day. It rained, and he was in this massive denim Union Jack trenchcoat or something like that, so he did the rest in a mac. People were wearing rubbish bags. It makes it better, it makes it an experience, wearing a rubbish bag on your head at a David Bowie gig.

Did he bust out ‘The Laughing Gnome’?
No, no ‘Laughing Gnome’ for us that time. He didn’t even do ‘Space Oddity’. He played the first couple of notes on a Stylophone and said, “But I’m not going to play that one.”

The Humourbeasts, like Flight Of The Conchords, is an amazing name. And like Jemaine, everyone’s bound to misspell it. Was that intentional?
It’s a misspelling in itself! People get The Beatles right, though. I would say that The Beatles became so big that people misspell the insect because of them. The Beatles is a bad play on words. The Silver Beatles, they were called.

What have your favourite comedy troupe or band names been over the years?
They’re always bad. That’s possibly what we were going for ourselves, I don’t know. It’s just what we came up with the day we had our first gig. We hadn’t come up with a name and we had a gig in four hours and the brand of our toilet was “Concorde”, so it literally came from the toilet. Someone I know was talking about starting a jazz quartet called “Four Play”. Small jazz groups have the best/worst pun names: “Saxcess”, “Sax Appeal” that kind of thing. It’s like pub quiz names – “Let’s Get Quizzical”, “Quizky Business” – or hair salon names, like “Hairoglyphics”.

Fish and chip shops, too: “The Codfather”, “Just For The Halibut”…
(Laughs) Yes! Actually, in the Mermaid song for Conchords, we do old-fashioned jokes, and that was one of them, “Just for the halibut”. I did not know that was a fish and chip shop. I need to go to that fish and chip shop.

What sort of roles were you offered after the success of Conchords?
Lots of roles were the arrogant friend of a famous person. Those were the things I was offered. A lot. Then I went through a phase where all the auditions I had were wizards, magicians and that kind of thing. I had four or five meetings in a row about me becoming a wizard or a magician.

Did you ever offered an arrogant best friend wizard role?
That would be the perfect role for me. To me, that sounds like a great character: an arrogant best friend who is also a wizard. But in a world where there are no wizards, just this guy. He’s your dorky but brash best friend who gives you advice on women. The other guy says, “That’s easy for you, you’re a wizard. I am not a wizard.”

Was it your idea to call your son Sophocles?
My wife is Greek, you see, and in Greece the tradition is to name your son after your father or grandfather. And her grandfather’s Sophocles, but I was going “You can’t call him Sophocles.” I was trying other Greek names. “How about Apollo?” I said. “It’s a spacecraft and a character in Rocky.” But it’s not tradition to name your son after a character in Rocky, so we didn’t go for it. People think he’s named after the tragedian, because I’m involved in… so much tragedy.

How insufferable has Bret been since the Oscar?
He’s just… confident. Even more confident. I don’t like that. It’s difficult to be the cocky best friend wizard when he’s so confident.

Rio 2 is in the UK on April 4.

Interview by Ali Plumb