IN T.O. FOR NETFLIX SPECIAL, RUSSELL PETERS CATCHES US UP
After a whirlwind two-year world tour that saw him hanging out with Saudi royals and Syrian refugees, Canadian standup superstar Russell Peters is winding down on home soil.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, performances at Toronto’s Massey Hall will be recorded for a Netflix special. Then, after a couple of other shows next month — and an appearance on
Lip Sync Battle with CeeLo Green — he’ll finally start a four-month break in June to spend time with his 5-yearold daughter.
“I’m kind of excited about it, actually — nervous and excited,” the 45-year-old said of taking so many months off for the first time in his career.
The Brampton-raised comic, who’s known for skewering racial stereotypes, is in town after performing 250 shows in 120 cities across 25 countries for his “Almost Famous World Tour” — his longest and biggest yet.
The Mideast has probably his biggest fan base, “the most rabid, that’s for sure,” said Peters.
In Saudi Arabia, one of the show promoters was a prince and he was “treated literally like royalty by royalty.”
Meanwhile, in Jordan, he visited the Zaatari Syrian refugee camp on a request by the Canadian government.
He discovered the children there don’t have aspirations of living in other countries, as he and many others had come to believe.
“They just want to go back to Syria,” said Peters. “I get it. When you’re there and you see it in their face, there’s no evil in them. They’re just displaced people, they just want to go home.”
Peters also beefed up his acting resumé while on tour, with credits including the Jon Favreau film Chef and Disney’s The Jungle Book, in which he voices the peacock and Rocky the Rhino.
For his appearance on Lip Sync Battle next month, liquid courage helped him get through his songs, which include “Oh, What a Night” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
“In all honesty, I was pretty hammered when I did that because that’s the only way you’re going to get me to sing and dance on TV like that,” he said.
“The good thing is, because I was a little buzzed, I was really taking shots at (CeeLo Green).”
Peters said he picked Massey Hall for his Netflix taping because he wanted to “scale it back to a normalsized venue” after previously recording specials at Madison Square Gar- den, the O2 arena and the Allphones Arena.
“I wanted to do it in my city,” he added, “and I think Massey Hall defines my city as that building has been there before all the other buildings.”
This is Peters’s second straight-to-Netflix special and he enjoys the freedom the platform offers.
“Regular TV, I deal with all their other corporate BS,” he said.
“Netflix is still run fairly loose, I would say. They let you do what you want to do and then they take the content.”
In his act, he plans to riff on some Canadian topics as well as his little girl, who lives in Los Angeles and has her father’s sassy nature.
“Too much of it,” he said. “But it’s so funny because she’ll do things the exact same way I would do something, and then I try to explain to her, ‘Baby, you can’t pull that on me, that’s exactly what I would have done. And I’m not mad at you because that’s exactly what I would have done.’
“She stalls when she doesn’t want to do something, or if she doesn’t want to say hi to you she’ll just make a face at you.”
Peters got his start at Toronto’s Yuk Yuk’s comedy chain, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Founder Mark Breslin recently told The Canadian Press he feels standup comedy has “gotten really, really soft,” which Peters agrees with.
“Political correctness has disallowed us to be angry,” he said.
“We have to be so accepting of everything that if you have an opinion on something, it automatically means you are against these people. And that’s not what it means. It means I have a preference, this is what I like and that’s what they like and we can still coexist quite fine, both liking different things.”