Illustration by JIM MCDERMOTT
FRESH AIR: Growing up, actor John C. Reilly remembers watching the comedy of slapstick duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and feeling very touched. It wasn’t just that the two made him laugh, Reilly says, there was something more. “The brilliant thing about their work when you watch it, it seems so nonchalant,” he says. “It seems like they’re doing it for the first time.” Then Reilly got a role playing Oliver Hardy in the new film Stan & Ollie and he realized just how much planning and precision went into those seemingly effortless physical comedy routines. “It requires this diligence with the timing,” he says. “It’s almost like a ballet or a piece of music that you’re playing when you’re doing it.”
The film explores Hardy’s relationship with his partner Stan Laurel (played by Steve Coogan) in the early 1950s, when the men were trying to revive their sagging careers with a stage-show tour in Britain. Reilly notes that the two comedians were very different temperamentally, and in their heyday, didn’t spend that much time socializing outside of work. But at this later time in their lives, during this theatrical tour, they were together in every train car, hotel room and theater backstage. “They didn’t have the luxury of going off and having two different lives,” he says. “They’ve both said that is when they learned to love the other man as a person, as a human being, as opposed to a component in the act.” MORE