How Weird Al Yankovic Got His Absurd, Chaotic “Biopic” with Daniel Radcliffe Made

You may think you know the story of Grammy-winning parody musician Weird Al Yankovic. But after you watch his absurdly hilarious biopic, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which began streaming free on The Roku Channel today, you’ll realize… you know even less than you did before.

“Obviously, I have to promote the movie,” Yankovic, 63, told Decider over Zoom, from the back of his tour bus in Atlanta, Georgia. “But part of me wishes that people could go into this movie not knowing anything about it and will believe, at least at the beginning, that it’s a really serious biopic.”

Audiences who saw the trailer may have been tipped off that Weird is not entirely serious when Al (played by Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe) starts passionately making out with Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood). Appropriately, the idea for a movie about Weird Al—known for parodying musicians like Michael Jackson, Miley Cyrus, Nirvana, and so many more—was born from a parody itself: a 2013 Funny or Die trailer for a fake Weird Al biopic. Yankovic played the video at his concerts for years, and it was so popular that Yankovic and the video’s writer/director, Eric Appel, were eventually convinced to turn parody into reality.

“Reality” being a relative term, of course. Directed by Appel, who also co-wrote the script with Yankovic, Weird pokes fun at Hollywood’s obsession with “based on a true story” music biopics, while also capturing the wacky, warm-hearted, lovable humor that makes “Weird Al” a legend to so many. Yankovic spoke to Decider about bringing the movie to life, his actual “true story,” casting Daniel Radcliffe, and more.

Warning: Mild spoilers for Weird: The Al Yankovic Story ahead. You may want to save this interview until after you’ve seen the film.

Decider: You’ve said hoped this movie confuses people. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

“Weird Al” Yankovic: Well, I don’t mean that I want my Wikipedia entries changed, or that I want people to really believe that I’m the person as portrayed in this movie. But just for the sake of enjoying the movie, I want to take people on a ride. Obviously, I have to promote the movie, and we all have to talk about it. But part of me wishes that people could go into this movie not knowing anything about it and will believe, at least at the beginning, that it’s a really serious biopic. Because it starts out fairly normally. And then it gets progressively more and more off the rails. So that’s all I meant is just, I hope that, at some point in the movie, people go, “Wait a minute… did this really happen?”

Can you share any details from the movie that are true? I read that you did get your first accordion from a traveling salesman, but I assume your dad did not beat that man up.

That is correct. This would have been 1966, maybe, so there was a time when people could go door-to-door and actually be traveling salesmen. That was part of my childhood. That gentleman was welcomed into our home, and my parents were offered either guitar lessons or accordion lessons for a young child. My parents made the life-altering decision that I should take accordion lessons. Because they figured when you played the accordion, you’re a one-man band, you’re the life of any party. Who wouldn’t want an accordion player hanging around? They thought if I learned the accordion, I would never be lonely! And it was a good decision because, Dr. Demento told me after the fact that if I had sent him a tape in the mail of me playing guitar, he probably wouldn’t have given it a second listen because there’s nothing unusual or novel about that. But a kid playing the accordion and thinking he was cool—he said that made his ears perk up and that that gave him the impetus to give me some airplay.

This movie was born from the “Funny or Die” trailer that came first. How did you and Eric Appel approach turning a trailer into a feature film?

For the longest time, we thought it shouldn’t be a film. It works well as a trailer, we hit all the beats, pretty much. We thought it was a great gag, and the fans loved it. But we just thought, “This is all it should be.” But after nine years of fans telling me, “When’s the movie coming out? This should be a movie!” it finally felt like the right time. We were experiencing a whole new wave of biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man. I was thinking, “Oh, these biopics really play fast and loose with the facts. They’re taking a lot of creative liberty. What if we did my movie, but just really, really went off the rails with it? Just made it completely insane by the end of the second act?” And I just woke up one morning, and I emailed Eric and said, “I think we should do the movie. I think we should make this happen.” So, yeah, we reversed-engineered it. We wanted to hit most of the same beats that were in the original trailer, but just make it bigger, expand it, and keep the feel and the tone of the trailer, but give it enough of a story that would feel like a real movie.

I love Aaron Paul in the trailer, but Daniel Radcliffe feels like a perfect choice to play you. How did that casting happen?

Well, our initial thought was to get the original cast from the Funny or Die video. But it didn’t work out that way. So we said, “OK, let’s start from scratch.” Eric and I sat down and came up with a list of half a dozen or so actors that we thought could pull off the role of me. The name that we kept gravitating toward was Daniel’s name—he had both the comedic chops and the dramatic chops, and both were very important for this movie. And, not to be too California about it, but he just had the right energy. It just felt like he would get it because we knew that he was a fan of alternative comedy. I knew that he was a big Tom Lehrer fan—Tom Lehrer was one of my heroes. I felt like we were kindred spirits. And we also were very aware of the fact that post-Potter, he selected a lot of offbeat, weird roles. We thought this would be up his alley. And as it turns out, it was! He jumped at the chance, which we were thrilled about.

Evan Rachel Wood is also perfect as Madonna, and she takes it to a place people might not be expecting. How did you come up with that wild storyline for Al and Madonna?

It started with the Funny or Die video. [Madonna] was my femme fatale in that. And we just extrapolated from that. We said, “Okay, we love this in the video. How can we make it even more crazy?” We took what was already there. We just kept building on it until she became a major part of the movie. And I don’t know if Madonna’s seen it yet. I kind of doubt that she has.  We didn’t get her blessing ahead of time, so we’re hoping that she’s cool with it and that she understands it’s a joke.

No one warned her?

I don’t think so. Our lawyers told us it would be best not to red-flag it with anybody because they’ve said they’re public figures, so it’s fair game. I took their word for it! Now that it’s done, we’re hoping that everybody has a good sense of humor about it.

You play the record label executive, Tony, who is this corporate antagonist, of sorts. What was it like being in this business, suit role playing out a scene with Daniel Radcliffe, who’s playing you?

That was an odd, out-of-body experience. The whole thing was so meta! It’s hard to focus—to be in the scene and make it work—because it was so odd for me to be playing my record executive, my record company president, and sitting across the table from Daniel Radcliffe, who was playing me. The whole thing was very odd. We try not to overuse the word “weird” in these interviews, but it was pretty weird!

There are too many cameos in this movie to count, but there is one I wanted to touch on—Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone from The Lonely Island. But where was Andy Samberg?

We asked all three of them. We had a couple of different iterations. In the original script, it was supposed to be Freddie Mercury at the pool scene. But that was one of the stipulations—the Queen estate was extremely nice and helpful, but they said right off the bat, “You cannot do anything with Freddie Mercury in this movie.” We rewrote it so that instead of Freddie Mercury, it was the other three guys from Queen. That was going to be The Lonely Island. But Andy had some family business he had to take care of at the time. So even though he wanted to, he couldn’t be part of it. But Akiva and Jorma still wanted to be in the movie. So I said, “OK, Jorma, you can be Pee-wee Herman, and Akiva, you can be Alice Cooper.”

Though this movie only focuses on your early parodies, I love the references to your future songs that you worked into the script—like Al being constipated long before he wrote that Avril Lavigne parody. Is there a reference you’re particularly proud of? 

There’s stuff there that people are going make up that I never even thought about! I never thought of the constipated reference until you brought it up just now. I mean, people were finding jokes there that I never meant. The big one—which everybody was making a big deal about—is when Dr. Demento meets Dan as weird Al, Dr. Demento says, “I’m your De-mentor!” That’s something that I always used to say in interviews about Dr. Demento. But everybody goes, “Oh it’s a Harry Potter joke.” That was never even the intention! But people will think, “Oh, he slipped a Harry Potter joke into the movie.”

Speaking of Dr. Demento, are you still in touch with the real Dr. Demento? What’s the real story of how he assisted your career?

Absolutely, yeah, we’re still good friends. In fact, he went to the Newport Beach premiere of the movie, in his top hat, tails. and everything. And he was extremely important to my life and career. I mean, my life would have been, I have to assume, completely different than it is today if Dr. Demento had never existed. When I was a teenager, there was nobody in the world that would have given me airplay other than Dr. Demento. And he gave me support and encouragement very early on that I can’t imagine I would have received from anybody else in that position. So yeah, in a very real way, he changed my life.

I read that you guys filmed this movie in 18 days, which was shocking to me. How is that possible?

That’s what I thought when we were first told 18 days! It was not easy. The only reason we were able to pull that off is because we had an amazing crew and an amazing cast. Daniel and Evan and Rainn and everybody—they knew the pressure we were under, and they just hit the ground running. They came prepared. We did everything in one or two takes, maybe three if we needed to. We were moving extremely quickly and I’m still amazed we were able to pull it off. I lived every day terrified that somebody would get COVID. If one of our main actors got COVID, the movie was done. There was no option for a reshoot. It would have been, “The movie is not happening now.” But we were all very lucky. The one COVID casualty was Aaron Paul, who was supposed to be doing a cameo appearance in the movie, as a nod to the original Funny or Die video. He showed up on set and tested positive, which he obviously didn’t know about. He had to go home and he said he was extremely sick for the next 10 days.

You’ve said that you had trouble getting studios interested this movie. What kind of reactions were you getting? How did you end up at The Roku Channel? 

We pitched it for a couple of years. We went through several rounds. The first round, we figured, “Oh we don’t need a script. I mean, we have the whole concept here!” We had the Funny or Die video, which was basically proof of concept. We said, “Here’s the idea. What do you think? Let’s do it!” And people were like, “Yeah, funny, but no, we’re not interested.” We thought, “No, this idea is too good. We have to do this.” So Eric and I basically came up with the whole basic plot of the movie. Then we were able to talk people through the whole movie. It was like, “Okay, this is the movie. Now what do you think?” They were still saying, “Yeah, great, but no, not for us.”

We couldn’t imagine why people weren’t jumping at this! Finally, we approached Daniel Radcliffe, and he signed on. Then we thought, “OK, who would not want this movie? Come on! Don’t you understand what this is?” And we still had a tough time selling it. I wish I could say there was a bidding war! But the only channel that really wanted to do this was Roku. Thank goodness for them.

It feels like after all these years, studios still don’t understand how big and passionate your audience is. Do you agree, and why do you think that is?

I agree that my audience is big and passionate! I don’t know why some of these studios weren’t getting that. I cannot tell you. It’s a miracle when something gets greenlit, so I can’t be too surprised. But it did amaze me for the whole time we were pitching the movie that nobody really got what this was and what it could become. I’m glad that now things are unfolding the way that I thought—people are freaking out and having a great time with the movie. I’m glad that Roku is enjoying the success from that because they deserve it.

There’s a new song on the credits, which mentioned that it’s technically Oscar-eligible. Are you guys going to submit the song for the Oscars?

Oh, that’s a big question. I’ve been begging Roku for months to make that happen. All that needs to happen is the movie needs to play in a small theater in Los Angeles for one week. That’s all that needs to happen. And Roku does not want to do that. And it breaks my heart. I figured this is my one chance at an Oscar nomination. But they don’t want to do it, because if it gets an Oscar nomination, then it’s not eligible for the Emmys. I don’t agree with this logic, but they say that they’re in the TV business, not the movie business. They would rather have a Creative Arts Emmy than an Oscar, is what I was told. It feels like weird logic to me, but I have to accept that. I don’t hold any grudges. I’m just thankful the movie got made.

You’ve been on tour doing original songs. Are you planning on recording a new album, maybe of original songs, parody songs, or a mix? What’s in the future?

I don’t think I’m going to be doing any more conventional albums as I did earlier in my career. But I will say that we will be doing a soundtrack album for the movie, which will include everything that I re-recorded for the movie, the score, and a bunch of the strange, licensed tracks that we got. I just finished mastering it, actually. That’ll be a nice little surprise for the fans when that comes out.

That’s really exciting. Do you have a tentative release date on that?

That has not been determined yet.

[UPDATE 11/4/2022: Yankovic announced in a tweet on Friday that the Weird: The Al Yankovic Story soundtrack is now available on digital music platforms. Time for a polka party!]

But wait, are you really not going to release any more conventional Weird Al parody albums?

I said that in 2014 when I put out my last album—I said “This will probably be the last one.” I’m not saying absolutely not, but I think, probably not. It’s not like I’m not recording songs anymore. I want to put stuff out when I record it, instead of waiting until I have 12 things and putting them out all at the same time. It took me 32 years to fulfill my album contract, which I signed in 1982. Now I’m a free agent, and I don’t need to get anybody’s permission to put out anything.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.