New leash on life
COMEDIAN JACK WHITEHALL HAD TO TAME HIS MORE ADULT HUMOUR FOR FUN FAMILY FILM ROLE
Making the transition to family entertainment was always going to be challenging for Jack Whitehall. The British comedian is best known for his sweary stand-up and more grown-up TV fare such as Fresh Meat, Bad Education and the hit Netflix road-trip series, Travels with My Father.
Recently he has been branching out though, doing it for the kids in this year’s Disney actionadventure Jungle Cruise and now in a big-screen adaptation of the beloved children’s book, Clifford the Big Red Dog.
But sometimes old habits die hard, and given the number of NSFW outtakes he did with the similarly profane Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson, he’s pretty sure there could be a version of Jungle Cruise somewhere that would make the kiddies’ ears bleed.
“There’s definitely an R-rated cut of Jungle Cruise that’s out there in the ether,” he says with a laugh via Zoom call from Los Angeles. “There’s a version of that film that definitely would not have made the certificate.”
He says he was much better behaved for Clifford, in which he plays man-child Uncle Casey opposite the giant titular CG canine, but this time was nearly brought undone by the language barrier between his native England and his colleagues across the Pond.
“I think I accidentally said the word ‘bollocks’ in one of the scenes, which was in the cut for quite some time,” he says. “And eventually, someone Googled it and realised what it meant and … that accidentally snuck into the movie.
“Fortunately, the finished piece is bollock-free. It’s very family friendly and will not have any of my smut anywhere near it.”
Whitehall, the son of television producer and agent Michael Whitehall, is full of praise for his junior co-stars in Clifford, particularly 14-year-olds Darby Camp and Izaac Wang, who he says are far more poised and together than he was at their age.
And while he admired their boundless, youthful energy in the sweet and inclusive story about a young girl and her feckless uncle who find themselves trying to wrangle the brightly coloured, oversized mutt in New York City, he was less impressed with their timing and music selections.
“There were quite a few times when we were in the make-up trailer at six o’clock in the morning and Izaac and Darby were playing Justin Bieber quite loudly. During the day, I would say I’m a Belieber, but at 6 o’clock in the morning, I think I’m more of a Bel-atheist and so I had to ask them kindly if maybe we could wait until eight or nine o’clock until we start playing Justin Bieber. And then the following morning, it was One Direction instead, so I don’t think the message quite got through.”
High on Whitehall’s list of priorities for signing up for Clifford was the chance to work with his comedy idol John Cleese, who plays the kindly, mysterious and magical Mr Bridwell. Whitehall says he’s always related to the physical comedy as well as the buttoned-up, class conscious, highly strung characters made famous by the Monty Python great, to the point that “all of my career thus far has just been an homage to him”.
“He’s the reason that I do what I do and I was very nervous about meeting him for the first time,”
Whitehall says. “But he is an incredible presence and he is avuncular and funny and even though he’s in his 80s has this incredible mischief and a big booming laugh as well.”
Whitehall has fond memories of his trip to Australia early last year for the final episodes of Travels with My Father, in which he and his curmudgeonly dad Michael have crisscrossed the globe as unlikely and hilarious travel companions. The pair just snuck the visit in before the coronavirus pandemic shut down global travel and they were put into lockdown when they returned to London.
“It was probably perfect timing because at the end of filming a series of Travels with My Father I am like ‘OK, I need a little bit of distance from my dad now’,” Whitehall says with a laugh. “It’s a little bit intense to be on the road with him for that long. And then, lo and behold, we go back to England and it was literally a law … that I couldn’t see him for a couple of months and I think both of us were fine with that at that point in time.”
It’s very family friendly and will not have any of my smut anywhere …