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 John Cleese has always been a man of many faces. As part of the British comedy troop Monty Python, he helped introduce the world to a new brand of timeless comedy. Since his Python days, he's been busy making films from A Fish Called Wanda to Harry Potter and appearing in numerous TV shows, theater productions, radio, and most recently, as Q in the last Bond movie, Die Another Day.
So when EA GAMES began working on a new and unique adventure for James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, adding Cleese to the list of talented actors and actresses for the game was an obvious choice. On Wednesday, as part of the press tour for the game, we had a chance to talk with Mr. Cleese about his experiences with the game and his role as the Bond's man of many gadgets.
EA GAMES (EAG): While you did work on Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic game a few years ago, your role as Q in Everything or Nothing is the first time you've been fully digitized in a game. What was your initial reaction to seeing your likeness in the game for the first time?
John Cleese: Yeah. Sometimes when I see myself, I'm generally surprised or I think that it looks odd. Or I'll stare at it for a few seconds. For example, I've just seen some of the footage for Shrek 2, which will be coming out in May. And the character that I'm playing there, the king, doesn't look the slightest bit like me. Whereas a lot of the Shrek characters do look ever so slightly like the actors or actresses who are voicing them. That is a little bit odd, but I have to say when I saw the Q likeness on the video game, it just seemed kind of what I was expecting. I was very happy with it.
EAG: How do you view the game as a supplement to the Bond film experience and what advantages does a game have over a film?
Cleese: It seems astounding to me now that the video games are perhaps as important as the movie themselves. And people will spend 2 or 3 years obsessing about the video game in exactly the same way that they'd be obsessing about the movie if they were working on that. And then you take on-board the fact that the video game could take in more money than the movie -- the whole thing seems extraordinary. But when you see the sheer quality with what they're able to do in these video games now, it's astounding. And I stopped playing video games 15 or 20 years ago and I'm going to back home now with one of these in my hands and go out and buy whatever I have to buy to play it and learn how to play it because it just looks like too much fun to miss. When you get to the age of 64 and you can't do one or two of the things that Bond does, it will be a nice little fantasy for me. It will do me good. [editor note: we asked what was the last game he played and it sounded like Atari's classic, Combat.]
EAG: After having experience with TV, film, theater, and now games, which one do you most enjoy doing?
Cleese: One of the reasons I like doing this kind of work, playing Q in [Everything or Nothing], is that I grew up in radio and I've always loved the simplicity of radio. If you've got words in front of you, all you have to do is read them in the microphone. You don't have to someone in for 40 minutes lighting you, you don't have people fluffying around you, doing your hair, spraying hair spray on you, and somebody putting makeup on. All that crap which is so boring is completely absent from radio.
EAG: Well, it's good to hear that you don't wear makeup when you're on the radio.
Cleese: Right now, you could never tell could you?
EAG: Undoubtedly, you grew up with Bond in books and film and while film adds a face to the character, Mr. Llewelyn, was the film face of Q for almost every Bond film. During TWINE, you had a chance to meet L face to face and meet the real man behind Q. Now that you've been given the chance to continue Q's role and Llewelyn's legacy, what type of balance do you establish between the book character that you imagined and the man who was Q? And what do you think, you as John Cleese, adds to the evolution of Q?
Cleese: I don't feel, to be perfectly honest, that I bring an enormous amount to q other then what Desmond had already created there. I did read a lot of the Bond novels when I was in my 20s and they're very good. I mean they're very good bits of writing. Bond is a little different because Sean Connery was wonderfully dangerous on the screen and dead sexy but he didn't have an old eternian swerveness that you actually got from reading the novels. Now something about Pierce, he has that. Which is why I think that Pierce makes such a great Bond.
I don't remember Q from the page. Everything in my mind to do with Q is Desmond, and Desmond as you know played 17 out of the 19 Bonds that were made why he was still alive. He didn't do the first one and for some extraordinary reason, they changed the casting somewhere in the middle. But what I'm really doing is playing Desmond's Q but it comes through the filter of Cleese so that since I can't do a perfect Desmond impersonation, it's slightly different. I'm not really trying to change anything; all the attitudes are there. And I don't have any eager needs to change it and make it mine. I'm just happy to do what's been established.
EAG: While Q never gets a chance at any of the Bond girls, do you think Q would have a favorite Bond girl that he would like to "equip"?
Cleese: Oh, how interesting! I always though Shirley Eaton was dead sexy when I was watching the movies, she was in Goldfinger, and she was in a number of British films and I always thought that she was one hot chick. And I'm sure she's at least my age now and I did actually meet her very briefly, too briefly, at some sort of a party, a fundraising thing that the Bond people organized. That was about 2 years ago in England. I thought that she was absolutely thrilling. And I actually had the pleasure of working with Carrie Lowell on Fierce Creatures, who of course was in [Licence to Kill].
You can catch John Cleese as Q in James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, now available for PlayStation 2, Xbox, Nintendo GameCube, and GameBoy Advance. |
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| 1. | Battlefield Vietnam
PC-CD |
| 2. | James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing
PS2, GC, GBA, & Xbox |
| 3. | The Sims Bustin' Out
PS2, GC, GBA, & Xbox |
| 4. | Need For Speed Underground
PS2, GC, Xbox, & PC |
| 5. | Medal of Honor Rising Sun
PS2, GC, & Xbox |
| 6. | The Lord of the Rings; The Return of the King
PS2, PC-CD, GC, GBA, & Xbox |
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Battlefield Vietnam Update
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