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Q&A: The Lion King’s Billy Eichner

Full disclosure: I had not seen the new Lion King when I sat down with Billy Eichner last month to talk about his performance as Timon the meerkat in Jon Favreau’s CG remake… and yes, that was weird. (Disney said the film wouldn’t be ready to screen for another couple of weeks.)

But we’ve all seen The Lion King, right? And we all know who Timon is supposed to be, right? He’s the jokey mongoose fella who, along with his gassy warthog pal Pumbaa (voiced by Seth Rogen this time around), teaches a heartbroken Simba to put aside his traumatic past and live in the present. So we can have that conversation, can’t we? How different can this movie’s Timon possibly be?

Besides, when you have the opportunity to talk to a cultural figure as distinct as Eichner – who established his over-the-top persona on the cult interview show Billy On The Street, spun it into the role of cranky Craig Middlebrooks on Parks And Recreation and then brought a more grounded, dramatic version to his role opposite Julie Klausner in the Hulu series Difficult People – you don’t turn it down. Eichner is now an in-demand character actor who’s also the first openly gay man to be writing and starring in a romantic comedy from a major studio.

Yeah, yeah – The Lion King has Donald Glover and Beyoncé and John Oliver in it. But this is Billy Eichner, for crying out loud.

It’s the end of June and we’re here to talk about a movie neither of us has seen in its finished form.

It is finished. I saw a rough cut back in October. They offered to show it to me, like, last week and I was like, “At this point I can’t change anything anyway, so I’ll just watch it at the premiere.”

I would imagine it’s a little late to fix a line delivery. That’s a pretty big train to turn around.

At this point, probably. I’m not gonna start giving notes.

So how did this work? How physical was the process? Did you perform the role live? Were you allowed to improvise?

There’s a ton of improv in it, especially with Timon and Pumbaa. I can’t speak for the other characters, but the first day that we got there we read through the script a couple of times – me and Seth [Rogan, who plays Pumbaa] and JD [McCrary], who plays young Simba, and then Donald [Glover] came in as older Simba.

They had built kind of like a makeshift stage in this big room in the production facility, and there were cameras and mics all over the perimeter of the stage. We were miked and Jon had us throw down the script and just said, “Okay, now go scene by scene through the movie and just riff.” Like, hit all the beats of the scene but with your own lines. It was shocking. But once we found our rhythm it was really fun, and a surprising amount of what came out of that session ended up in the movie.

On your recent episode of Conan O’Brien’s podcast, you told a story about getting in trouble as a theatre major in college because you added your own jokes to The Odd Couple. So clearly you have no trouble thinking in the moment.

I mean, Billy On The Street is all improvised, and I come out of the comedy world – well, I come out of an improv background, and actually a musical background before that – but improv is what I’m known for. What I think was so genius about Jon doing that and keeping it in the movie – not just using it as an exercise – was that it really gives the dialogue a very conversational feel. It feels very real and very grounded, and in a way that matches the photorealistic aesthetic of the movie. It’s not this Borscht Belt-y, vaudevillian style of doing it – which was an incredible way of doing it [in the original animated film] but would not have matched the visuals in this movie.

You’re playing a photorealistic Timon, so you can’t be as broad as Nathan Lane was in the hand-drawn version.

Nathan Lane, who I grew up worshipping… and Ernie Sabella [the voice of Pumbaa], too. I grew up in New York City seeing Broadway shows I saw them [both] in Guys And Dolls when I was 13 years old. They had just come out of that when they did The Lion King, so they brought a lot of that Broadway style to their roles – that Borscht Belt sensibility of how you deliver jokes and all of that.

That’s where the Disney films were at the time, too.

Totally. Robin Williams, too, in Aladdin. The style that we used for Timon and Pumbaa is much more current. I’m a Broadway guy – that’s my first love and I love that sensibility – but if you’re going to do a new version of the movie you do want it to feel different. Again, the photorealism of the movie would make something that felt too exaggerated, in terms of a vocal performance, not the right fit.

As a segue, you mentioned on that Conan podcast that Billy On The Street has been around for 15 years now – so, happy anniversary?

Well, I’ve been doing Billy On The Street-style videos for 15 years. I originally did that for my live show in New York City before YouTube even existed, so it’s not like the general public has seen those – although some of them are on YouTube in, like, grainy old videos. But this summer marks the 15th year that I’ve been doing some version of it, and it’s still going. And people like it, thank god.

Over that time, you’ve established this persona that’s so much bigger and louder than yourself – and eventually it migrated beyond the bit. They cast you on Parks And Recreation as an over-the-top loud guy.

Oh I see – you mean, did it stereotype me?

No, I mean how do you un-stereotype yourself now and show a broader range?

I think now I’m starting to come out of it. There’s always pros and cons to introducing yourself to the world in that bold a fashion. For years, the thing that people knew me for was Billy On The Street. And then people who didn’t even know Billy On The Street discovered me on Parks And Rec. And then they went back and were like, “Oh, he’s not using that character on Billy On The Street, Parks And Rec is using his Billy On The Street persona!” Whichever you discovered first, they were similar personas.

I’ve worked really hard to create a career that is eclectic, where I can do things beyond Billy On The Street while continuing to do Billy On The Street. In the States we did five years of half-hour episodes on cable, and I stopped that because we had just done enough of it – but we still do videos for the web, and celebrities still want to do them. They reach out to us now – it’s crazy. And people who love Billy On The Street really, really love it. That fan base is very passionate. It gives people a little joy so I don’t want to stop doing it, but at the same time I am an actor. I went to Northwestern, I was a theatre major, I grew up doing musicals. The Lion King is a really nice moment for me to showcase the fact that I sing and all that, because that’s what I originally wanted to do.

You’ve been in plenty of other stuff as well.

I did American Horror Story, I did Friends From College, I’m writing this rom-com for Universal, and doing a Netflix special, and maybe there’ll be other things.

When Billy On The Street came along and people started to notice it, they just didn’t know me in any other way. I made the choice to use my own name, unlike Sacha Baron Cohen saying “I’m Borat,” or “I’m Bruno.” Sometimes I used to think, “Should I have used a different name, so people would know that wasn’t me?” Because when you’re saying “I’m Billy Eichner and this is Billy On The Street” and you’re screaming at people and going crazy, people are like, “Oh, there’s that crazy Billy guy.” Then you have to spend years kind of educating people on the rest of the Billy Eichner experience. I’ve done so many other things – talk shows, endless talk shows I have a big Twitter presence – which became very political and became very clearly separate from Billy On The Street, which is so pop-culture-centric.

People have to open their minds, too Hollywood underestimates audiences pretty much constantly. Then there are some people who are narrow-minded and you just have to ignore those people.

Which brings us to Twitter. So when you’re talking about gay rights or progressive causes like basic human dignity, and people take offense to that…

I pay no mind to people on social media who call me names. I just feel compelled to speak out. And without getting too dark and deep in this particular conversation, what really changed the amount that I speak about things publicly – because I was always a political junkie in my own life but I just wasn’t very vocal about it on social media or in my public persona – but, it was Pulse, the shooting in Orlando a few years ago at the gay club. I’m gay, and the gun situation in America has always driven me insane. But that really hit home. After that, I started to really talk about politics on social media a lot. It’s not even politics it’s really morality and ethics and the mixture of that… and Trump, and just the whole thing.

It does become very overwhelming, but I also think there are pros and cons to the way you use social media. It can be good just to be angry it’s cathartic. Anger is powerful. Anger rallies people. At the same time if you’re going to do that, it is also important to me to use it for productive means. So in the States I started this campaign with Funny or Die, the company that’s produced Billy On The Street all these years, and I said, “Instead of just getting angry, let’s be productive.” And we went all over the country and did events and signed up voters. That was Glam Up The Midterms, and we got so many young people to vote in our midterms last year.

When it came time for election day I was flooded with messages on Instagram from young people going to vote in the midterms, which people never vote in. And we flipped the House. So for me that was a sign that social media can be used for something productive and positive. And I’m going to keep doing it.

@normwilner

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