My Dad Wrote A Porno - Footnotes: Mara Wilson

Episode Date: June 29, 2017

Star of childhood classics Mrs Doubtfire, Matilda and Miracle on 34th Street, Mara Wilson joins the gang to talk all things Belinda Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hello and welcome to My Dad Wrote a Pawn of the Footnotes. This week we are joined by a pretty special guest to James, Alice and I. She is the star of some of our favourite childhood films. The triumvirate of Mrs Doubtfire, Miracle on 34th Street and Matilda. Matilda herself, it's Mara Wilson. Hello. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm very happy to be here. We are so excited,

Mara. Yeah, I noticed actually that in one of the first episodes, when we were talking about the name Rocky Flintstone, you said it's like combining one of your favorite characters with your favorite names. And you said, so mine would be Matilda Doubtfire. And I was just like, oh, I feel, yeah, I got such a warm, fuzzy feeling when I heard that. I sort of stopped watching films after you stopped making them. So that's like the extent of my movie knowledge. Honestly, this is probably the best day of my life. Yeah, I'm so glad.

I'm so glad to be a part of this. It's just so funny. And it's so many things that I love. And it's brought me a lot of joy and a lot of things I hate too. But I love sort of like dad culture. Yeah. Although I can't imagine. I mean, I love sort of like dad culture yeah although I can't imagine I mean I love my father but he's a very gentle and very genteel man and he would never do anything like this probably just the idea of it would be too much for him Mara I thought that as

well so what are the things that you hate about it okay anything with food and sex kind of grosses me out because I just feel like that's and this is actually a phrase I say a lot, that's a yeast infection waiting to happen. That's just not healthy. And I don't think food and sex, I mean, actually one of the first like erotic books I ever read was, and it wasn't even really erotic, it was romantic, was Like Water for Chocolate. I was 13. And yeah, that book is all about food and sex. And at 13, I was like, wow, this is really hot. And then I got a little bit older. And I was like, in real life, all those things would probably be a big mess. And you'd have to clean it up. And it would be really gross. The cleanup. Yeah, I think about that a lot. I mean, yeah, I don't want to spoil

things for future episodes. But chocolate is about to feature in a very, very real way. I know, I'm sorry. Oh no, oh God. Maybe skip that episode. Spaghetti bolognese was terrible enough, but chocolate. I'm just amazed you were reading porn at 13 years old. Well, it's not explicit, but there is definitely sex happening in it. So any other particular highlights or lowlights? I really loved the stuff with the Duchess,

but I think a lot of my favorite parts have been rocky's attitudes towards americans in general oh yeah discuss yeah it's very very clear how he feels about americans and i mean we're not exactly in good standing with the rest of the world right now so i understand but this was already written a few years ago so i know height of obama what was he thinking all of his American characters are caricatures right like Jim Sterling is just and the thing is I I'm not sure if it was suggested I think somebody's also suggested at some point that Danny DeVito could play him in a movie yeah the thing is Danny has a very very good sense of humor about himself and he's always up for doing weird shit so honestly I heard that and I was like and it made me a little uncomfortable but i was like yeah danny would actually probably love to do that really do you reckon he'd be up for playing

jim sterling he plays the weirdest parts i mean i don't know if you've seen him on it's always sunny in philadelphia he there's a scene where he climbs nude out of a couch cushion uh he's he's a werewolf who appears you know totally nude in big fish he's oh yeah he just likes he really does like doing the weird shit and he has a great sense of humor about himself and he's he's a werewolf who appears, you know, totally nude in Big Fish. He's, he just likes, he really does like doing the weird shit. And he has a great sense of humor about himself. And he's, he's a really nice guy. And so honestly, he would probably hear this and be like, this is amazing. I don't want to like, you know, be like, oh yeah, Danny would totally go for that. And Danny would be like, what the hell, Mara?

But he's like my fun uncle, you know, so. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Matilda, I mean, I have just mostly happy memories of filming it it felt kind of like summer camp to me was it before or after mrs doubtfire was it like it was after mrs doubtfire i can i mean i can kind of remember it but i was i was five years old at the time alice does the lisp often i often do but it smells funny and you skip the parts it's so cute i've often tried to use that in like job interviews and things where i want to endear people to me alice is currently unemployed

i think it was robin's suggestion to add she smells funny too but uh yeah a lot of the lines there were his suggestions uh so that that one was good too but i also embarrassed myself a lot because i was five and didn't know what i was doing like the day that my mom gave me the sex talk and the next day I came to work and asked one of the makeup artists if she had done it. Oh my God. Yeah, and then I think I actually started singing,

I know about sex, I know about sex. And I looked over and I saw Robin and Chris Columbus and Robin was in full Doubtfire drag talking about how I had been, you know, like, did you hear Mara was asking Virginia about sex sex and her name was virginia which just made it even better yeah thing and then once i once i actually i don't know gain some more cognitive capacity i would lay at night thinking about that just being like yeah i love that universally singing i know about sex means you generally don't know about sex it's definitely not a song rocky could sing

his birthday's coming up right it is well done yeah i think that you should get him an anatomy manual that's a great gift i did i struggle every year what to get my dad obviously now he's like a porn baron what do you get the man who has everything slash nothing um so that's a good idea and maybe like bookmark the pages that he needs to look at but but it also i mean it's sort of the part of the charm slash horror of the books that he doesn't know these things i actually have to say that another thing i really love are his q and a's that make no sense oh my god honestly try having dinner with him honestly mara i would love having dinner with him but the whole time i would just be in my head I would just be thinking what the hell are you on about

that's pretty much what it's like yeah one of my favorite things and I think I cried laughing talking about this and is that they ask him what's with the symbols oh my god and I like that Stephen King Steph King told him

that it's all about incorporating symbols into your work and he took that literally he means characters and weird runes quite literally who'd have thought that subtlety would be lost on rocky flintstone i mean it's so it's so bizarre it's just so literal i also you know i don't know if you know this but but in America, Angie Harmon, the actress that he imagines to play her. Yeah. She's known for being one of the most politically conservative actresses in Hollywood. Really?

Yeah. A lot of people just like straight out don't like her because she's Republican. There goes dad's vote. So I don't know if she would be gay. Yeah. He's picked the wrong pinup girl there, clearly. Yeah, I've been thinking for a while. I'm like, who could play Belinda?

Let's talk honestly, okay? Yeah. Is the Belinda Blinked movie the film that could bring you out of retirement? Can you see yourself as Belinda? Well, the thing is, I don't. I mean, I've acted in a few things. I was on that show Broad City. I do a lot of voiceover work still.

Yeah, and I love doing voiceover work. So if a lot of voiceover work still. Yeah, I love and I love doing voiceover work. So if there's any voiceover in Belinda Blink, for sure. You could be her clit. Oh my god. That would actually be amazing. Mara Wilson is the clit. That would be yeah, that would actually be amazing. I would love that. I've had a very low voice for a very long time. I can be sexy characters. I can be villains. I can be old ladies. I can be all kinds of things just in voiceover. And I love that.

We'll have to workshop the clit then. We'll have to figure out exactly what the clit's voice is. Yeah. Talking of accents, what do you think of, Jamie's brought a lot of characters now to the book, a lot of accents. What do you think of them all? I like them. I'm impressed with the american accent sometimes uh it kind of comes and goes yeah some of the accents yeah the russian one was not very good okay um a lot of the a lot of the foreign language ones have not been very good but i do think i am kind of impressed i was like oh that american actually isn't that bad to be fair though mara

like i'm not really a trained actor in any way and also really would be not really go on make excuses yeah and also the accents are supposed to be bad that's the whole point like these books are bad the accents are bad yes of course they are okay that can be your defense that can be your defense yes your Brazilian one this week was particularly came under fire because you added a lisp to it yeah because I thought it'd be funny but obviously no one really gets the joke but it's all right it's fine i can take it i've got i have a thick skin it does it does seem a bit exhausting i am amazed by the the stamina and the uh and the the amount of energy everybody in this book has oh people are non-stop rabbits like they just don't even take a breath for you know feeding or cleaning themselves sometimes they don't sleep and nobody ever has a hangover yeah exactly i think this is rocky's

idea of utopia utopia is a relative concept maybe this is his utopia everybody is pansexual everybody is drunk all the time but never hungover it's it does feel like it's still sort of like London in the 70s. But it is kind of like a baby boomers idea of like what utopia is. I'm very curious about Rocky. I'm very, very curious about who he is and how he got this way. I don't know. I mean, I do think that the legacy of Rocky Flintstone will probably live on forever. Are you trying to wangle an invite to the pavilion here, Mara? You know, you know, I haven't been to the UK in a while, but yeah, I mean,

I'm sure that there's no way he knows who I am at all. I mean. Oh, are you kidding me? Matilda is the biggest film in our house. My three sisters and I used to watch it religiously. Go, Brucie, go.

Oh my goodness. He slithered like a serpent into the kitchen. We could honestly do the whole thing. Well, that's really good. That's really flattering. I'm glad that he is a part of it. I think, you know, Pam Ferris is another person who I feel like would be great in the movie. Because she played the trunchbull in Matilda.

She was the trunchbull, yes. And she is the kindest person I've ever met. We need a good role for her then. Who could she play Pam? Who's Pam good for? I mean, the obvious thing would be the Duchess, but... It would be the Duchess but it would be the Duchess but Daisy Ridley has has called her Helga Helga Helga could be good she'd be a good Helga

actually in all the woolen yeah and didn't Helga have her own chokie that she just lived in a corner of the office this makes so much sense this must be what it feels like to be a great casting director when you find the right person for a role. Yeah, I was actually thinking about this the other day. And I, I realized that all of the actresses that I went out like on parts with people like Kristen Stewart and Aaliyah Shawkat and Evan Rachel Wood, all of us, we all went out for each other's parts. And we all looked different. But I looked back at us and I was like we all either grew up to be gay or bisexual casting directors know what they're doing we need bisexual people for this film so if you know anyone like everyone just has sex with everyone so everybody's just kind of pansexual and everybody's

just kind of like I I liked that Peter Rouse's wife was very open to the idea because the idea of cheating and the idea of using sex as like a weapon to hurt people that always has bothered me so i like the idea that christina was just all for it they're all just they're just bonobos that's what they are they just use sex to communicate with each other and one of my brothers actually studied primatology so he has a lot of books on on apes and primates because bonobos just use sex to communicate with each other, to like commune with each other. Yeah, they like greet each other by like touching penises and things. And that's kind of what I feel like.

I feel like I'm at the zoo when I listen to Melinda Blank. That is the best assessment I've ever heard. I mean, there are like arguments and there are books out there that say like we human beings are more like bonobos. We should all just be, you know, into this free love kind of world but like belinda blinked kind of is that it's all problems are solved using sex they are it's like problems like rewards business deals it's the currency for everything so maybe this is set in the future where um i don't know where we've devolved a bit back to bonobos yeah so would you think that the representation of bisexuality in these books is accurate? Like, what do you reckon?

Um, I, I, no. Well, for some people, people find more people attractive when they're bisexual. I'm still picky. So it just means that there's, there's more than one gender that I'm bad at dating. But, but there are people who are bi or pansexual who are just kind of like interested in everybody and interested in all kinds of people. And to them, it might be. But yeah, but it isn't just I think this world is kind of interesting in itself, where I do think in some ways, it is kind of forward where people are just sort of incidentally, you know, pan or bisexual,

and it is like not considered a thing. Yeah. is actually kind of nice where it's just like, oh yeah, of course we assumed you would be into these people and you would be, and everybody's just kind of attracted to everyone. And that is actually kind of nice. But I have been arguing that we need more boring bisexual representation.

Yeah, because a lot of people are, you know, they're villains, they're evil or they're super sexy. And I mean, I'm just like sitting here, you know, drinking tea and like, you know, trying to get my cats to come over. Or they're Bella, to be fair. Oh God, or they're Bella, who is, Bella's amazing. I do. I love Bella's accent. Oh, thanks.

Mara, it sounds like you're getting tired. You're not making any sense. You've gone mad. No, I do though, because she's such, she's such a character. you're not making any sense you've gone mad no i do though because she's such she's such a character although i do think it is very weird that your father based her on somebody you knew i know i know but i think we all have a friend like bella everyone's got a bella i think this book is also this book is also a great example of how uh writing fiction can be more revealing than writing non-fiction so true it's not even like what his sexual fantasies are,

but just like what he thinks is sexy, which nobody thinks is sexy, or what he thinks is fun and interesting, which is, you know, wine and turkey sandwiches. You're so right. We shouldn't get criminals to write confessions. We should get them to write porn and it will reveal everything.

Exactly, exactly. It reveals so much. Well, you know what your homework is, Mara? You got to ring Pam, you got to ring Danny and give us those RSVPs for this filming. I think, yeah. I wonder if Danny has listened to it yet. I bet he would love it.

I love the idea that we might be bringing you all back together. You, Danny and Pam. Yeah, that would actually be amazing. The Matilda reunion in porn. Yes. Can you imagine the headlines? From you to 18. I do like to say that i feed off ruined childhoods so well mara thank you so so much for coming on my dad read porn of the footnotes

it's been amazing having you you've kind of made our lives yes i feel like we're gonna wake up in the morning and be like did we really just do that like was that a real thing this has been so much fun like this is such a fun show and it's so ridiculous. And yes, I have spread the good word of Rocky and I will continue to do so. Thank you so much for everything. Well, thank you. For your life's work.

Thank you. It is all culminated in this moment. Picture this. You're at a picnic with pals and bam, you suddenly feel unwell. But going to the clinic, not the ideal weekend plan. Well, those days are over. Maples Virtual Care has got your back. With 24-7 access to licensed doctors and nurse practitioners within minutes. Need a diagnosis

or prescription? Sorted right from your phone, right in time for your next picnic. Download the Maple app today and have more summer this summer.