Matt Berry on "What We Do in the Shadows," "Toast of London" and more

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Actor-comedian extraordinaire Matt Berry is our guest this week! Matt currently stars on the FX series What We Do in the Shadows, a show about a group of vampires living in current-day Staten Island. Matt joins us to talk about playing a vampire, where he got the inspiration for his Toast of London character, and how writing songs from the perspective of a serial killer really boosted his career. All that and more on Bullseye!

See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.

NPR Privacy Policy

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:11.0	Coming to you from my house in Los Angeles, it's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn.
0:25.4	There are comic actors who are kind of chameleonic.
0:29.7	They have crazy range, play a million different characters, and always do an amazing job.
0:35.6	Matt Barry is not one of those comic actors.
0:39.2	He pretty much does the one thing, but boy is he great at it.
0:44.8	What is the thing that he does?
0:46.4	I guess you could call it haughty, elegant buffoon.
0:50.4	The kind of person who starred in an award-winning West End production of Richard III in 1988,
0:55.8	and then blustered his way onto a police drama only to forget his lines and say mean things
1:02.4	to somebody from craft services.
1:04.7	Thank you, roughly what I'm talking about, right?
1:07.6	That's what Matt Barry does.
1:09.2	He's hilarious and brilliant at it.
1:11.9	Maybe my favorite thing he's ever done is a show called Toast of London, which he also
1:15.7	created.
1:16.9	Matt plays an aging buffoonish actor who makes a living doing voiceover.
1:22.0	Just to be clear, so these will be heard on every submarine in the Royal Navy.
1:25.9	Yeah, they're just automating and digitizing everything.
1:28.2	You know, they come on to press his a button, and they're calling up your voice will be
1:31.2	hurting me.
1:32.2	Yeah, I'm not interested in all that.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.