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Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement visits with Tom
May 28, 2015, 10:07 PM | Updated: May 29, 2015, 12:59 pm
Jemaine Clement visited with Tom Tangney in the KIRO Radio studios and discussed how the two look quite a bit alike. (MyNorthwest)
(MyNorthwest)
This video is half of Tom’s interview with Jemaine Clement. To hear the full interview, follow the link below.
Jemaine Clement may not be the funniest man alive, but I don’t know anybody who makes me laugh more. He talks funny, he sings funny, and he looks funny, and he takes full advantage of that.
Listen: Full interview with Jemaine Clement
It’s something I wanted to discuss with him because, in my family, I’ve been told that we are doppelgangers.
“I see that,” Jemaine said. “I do. The gap in the teeth.”
Not just us, but we both get likened to other celebrities. For example, I’ve been told I look like Stephen King.
“I get Stephen King as well,” Jemaine said. “I wasn’t that complimented by that. I did love his book on writing; it wasn’t the photo on the back that I loved.”
For the uninitiated, Clement is one-half of the New Zealand musical parody duo Flight of the Conchords.
His “Flight of the Conchords” HBO series has already attained cult status. And Jemaine and his partner Bret Mckenzie are expanding their artistic horizons in the movies.
Brett won an Oscar for Best Song last year and Jemaine has acted in a growing number of movies, both large — Men In Black 3″ — and small — “Eagle vs. Shark.” He’s the voice of the Cockatoo in the Rio movies, and plays a minion in the Despicable Me films.
And this year, he’s stars in one of best films of 2015, the brilliant faux-documentary about vampires, “What We Do In The Shadows.”
His latest film,” People Places Things,” just played to full houses at the Seattle International Film Festival and I was lucky enough to snag him for an interview on a very rainy Saturday.
“The people are as warm as the weather is wet,” he said. “We are soaked with hospitality.”
Though his film career is expanding, he’s not dying to try his hand at, say, Shakespeare?
“I would rather be able to play the solo to Purple Haze,” he said. “I feel like it might be an easier thing to do to play Hamlet.”
That musical passion was evident in the cult-phenomenon “Flight of the Conchords. Legions of fans hold out hope for a return of the HBO TV series, but Jemaine says it was just too much work.
“We couldn’t keep it up. We were writing the show and as a writer you want to at least do one rewrite,” he said. “But sometimes we would get to filming, we would have written the song the day before and have to do a music video that day. It got too crazy.”
“We gave ourselves too many jobs. We didn’t get other people to write the songs and we were always in charge of the scripts because we wanted to control it. And it kind of ruined our lives,” he said with a chuckle.
And finally, I was curious about whether he felt any professional rivalry with his Flight of the Conchords partner, Bret McKenzie, especially after McKenzie won an Oscar for his song “Man or Muppet” featured in the 2011 film, “The Muppets.”
“Interview is over!” Jemaine joked.
“Bret and I met at university, he was studying music composition and I was studying theater and film,” he said. “I wish I was a better musician, I can’t even read music, so I was never going to win the Oscar for best song. So it’s not a competitive thing. I was very proud of him.”
“People, Place, Things” opens in August at SIFF Cinema.
