Some Serious Fun for Scott Thompson
Courtesy of CANOE.com
Monday, 27 April, 1998
By JIM SLOTEK -- Toronto Sun
It was not one of the cheerier visits home last week for Scott Thompson. The former Kid In The Hall was guest speaker at an event for the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario, recalling his late brother Dean, who died by his own hand two years ago.
"Comedy for me has always been a way of addressing tragedy, but I'm not going to be funny tonight," Thompson said, uncomfortable with the subject hours before the event. "I'm having a hell of a time dealing with it. I've written tons of stuff and I'm probably not going to be able to use any of it."
We talk about about schizophrenia, and how people in the public eye are exposed to it, in encounters with reality-challenged people who think the media talks directly to them.
"That's what happened with my brother," Thompson says. "A number of times he'd call and say he knew I was talking to him with that bit or this ... that this was about him -- and sometimes it was," Thompson says with a sardonic laugh.
"In some ways he was right on."
Thompson, "the openly gay one," and in many ways the most provocative and willing to shock of the Kids, was in unfamiliar territory for a comic, hashing out his own emotions without a mask or some other comedic device.
It'll be different in June when he returns to T.O. on a book tour for Buddy Babylon, a "bio" of Buddy Cole, his sad and funny gay lounge lizard from Kids In The Hall. Thompson will do the tour in character as Buddy.
"This book will be a bit of a shock to Buddy fans who expect him to be Eurotrash or some kind of minor European royalty," he says, warming to the topic. "The surprise is that Buddy is from Quebec and he's the child of pig farmers. It's all about how he invented himself as this other thing. He really has become a real person to me, especially after writing 275 pages of his life story. He's more real than I ever banked on."
Real enough that Buddy also stars as King of Scottland on Thompson's own website (www.scottland.com) where "he's becoming more and more megalomanical and drunk with power." He's also planning a one-man show starring Buddy.
Thompson has more time for such things now, with the end of Garry Shandling's Larry Sanders Show, where he played Hank Kingsley's assistant Brian for the last three years (a gay character they're just exploring in the final season -- which has just come to Canada on The Comedy Network). "For a long time I was disappointed and frustrated and felt I was not used properly and was very peripheral to the show. After being a Kid In The Hall at the centre of something, it was hard to go to the perimeter.
"But this season is great for me. At the beginning of the year Garry and I had a talk about where I wanted to go with the character and there's an actual episode about Brian (in which he sues Phil the writer for sexual harassment).
"In fact, that was a strange thing to me, with the hoopla over the lawsuit between Garry and Brad Grey (a $100-million suit against Shandling's former manager for misappropriation) people expected that Garry would be impossible this year. On the contrary, he's never been less impossible ... in fact he's never been more possible," he says, savoring the absurd wordplay.
With 360 directions to go, Thompson seems intent on checking them all out. He's become a standup fixture at the L.A. alternative club Largo, where "I go up and tell embarrassing stories about sex, y'know, whatever."
He's also soon to be seen in a couple of screen projects, including More Tales Of The City, the sequel to the acclaimed Armistad Maupin tragicomic miniseries about urban gay life. "It's a small part. I play kind of an A-list gay at a party."
And then there's Mickey Blue Eyes, "a Mafia romantic comedy in which I play an FBI agent trailing Hugh Grant and his wife and James Caan. Jeanne Tripplehorn is the wife and James Caan is the father-in-law who's a Mafia don."
And did he talk to Hugh Grant about, y'know, whatever? "No, actually," he says, laughing. "The whole time I'm doing the movie I'm thinking 'When will I have the opportunity to make a joke about his hooker, when is the right time, what is the mourning period on a scandal?' And it's very clear in Hugh Grant's case there is no right time, which is a shame."
I'm with him there, Hugh. Life's too short.
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