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“Weird Al” Yankovic is aware that there are some folks who, after watching Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, will think it’s 100% true. “They think I got assassinated in 1985. I mean, there are those people out there,” he laughs while speaking to Consequence.
Yankovic has been working in the realm of parody for long enough to know that that’s just the way some humans are. “The problem with doing any kind of irony or satire is there are going to be some people that just take it at face value. I learned that on social media; no matter how sarcastic I’m being or how obviously ironic, somebody will think I’m being completely honest — that I’m telling it just like it is. So I know that there’s some people that watch the whole movie and think the whole thing’s true.”
Complicating things is the fact that Weird, which is now available for on Blu-ray and DVD thanks to Shout! Factory, does include a few kernels of truth about the life of our finest creator of spoof songs (played in the film by Daniel Radcliffe). “We wanted people to ideally watch the movie not knowing what kind of movie it was, thinking that maybe it’s a real honest-to-goodness biopic,” Yankovic says. “So we start off fairly normal and semi-believable… And then it gets crazier and crazier and by Act 3, I’m fighting off the drug cartels singlehandedly.”
Yankovic does hope that the events of the film don’t “become my Wikipedia entry somewhere down the line, where they change all the real facts to make it like the movie. But I think there’s enough people that know the real story that I’m not that concerned.”
However, Yankovic notes, “We also thought it would be good to throw in things that seem like we made them up, but they’re actually true. Like, the door-to-door salesman [who sold my parents an accordion] is one example. And also the fact that I recorded my first single in a public restroom, that is also actually true. There are a few things like that, that seem like they could have been fiction, but they’re actually part of my real story. We just thought that was important, to further confuse people.”
