The Daily Beast Podcast - Richard Curtis vs. Hugh Grant; Inside Menendez Bros

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

For Thanksgiving, we have a MAGA-free episode full of holiday warmth, true crime, and absurdity. Iconic filmmaker Richard Curtis, the creative force behind Love Actually and Notting Hill, joins us to discuss his new Netflix movie, That Christmas, and Hugh Grant’s hilariously hostile tribute at Curtis’s honorary “Better Than Nothing” Oscar. Daily Beast CEO Ben Sherwood shares stories of growing up near the Menendez brothers and his decades-long fascination with their case, now making headlines with shocking new twists. Plus, a glimpse inside Gloria Steinem’s storied home, a laugh-out-loud tangent on mischievous Thanksgiving balloons, and Joanna Coles recounts a surreal dinner with O.J. Simpson during which he smashed a whiskey glass. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, just pop it in to share an excerpt from the newest episode of the Daily Beast podcast, hosted by our chief creative and content officer Joanna Coles and late night legend Samantha Bee. Thrilled to be joined by this week's Beast of the Week. Richard Curtis, a true titan of the rom-com genre. His credits read like a masterclass in the genre for weddings and a funeral, which earned him an Oscar nomination. Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's diary, love actually, and about time. and he hasn't just defined the rom-com. He's elevated it, proving that these films can be as nuanced, as existential, and as deeply felt as any great work of art. He set the bar so high you'd need stilts to even brush the bottom of it.

And beyond the screen, he's made an indelible mark as the co-founder of Comic Relief UK and now USA, helping raise over $2 billion in 40 years and changing the look. lives of more than 170 million people. And now Sam and I are just two girls in a Zoom waiting to talk to Richard Gertis. Congratulations on your Oscar, which you picked up last week. Jen is a surprise to all of us. Well, Hugh Grant described it as a better than nothing, Oscar. Can you tell us what it was like being in the room? Because it's a separate ceremony to the Oscars that are televised, isn't it? Yeah, it was a lovely night. There were four Oscars given out.

They're kind of the governor's Oscars. And yeah, my son described it as the Oscar for someone who's never made and maybe good enough to win an Oscar. Which is classic trials comment about their parents. Which is harsh. But it was a gorgeous evening, one, because you know you're going to win. I mean, can you imagine? I was once up for an Oscar and we didn't win. I just remember an enormous sense of relief.

but this is the Gene Herscheld Award, which was sort of for humanitarian works. And I was just imagining how grim it had been if there had been nominees. You know, this person has raised 2.3 billion, but this person has raised 7.1 billion. So, unfortunately, the winner is. But it was quite relaxing to know that it was coming my way.

And it was a sweet night, and my sons were with me and we're very excited to meet some people in the room. That was particularly tough. And it was for your work around comic relief, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, and also the gala for comic relief, which is coming up soon,

and I'm very excited to be co-chairing this year. Right, and I'm so thrilled you're doing that. Well, let's see if we raise any money. I feel like you've got your Oscar now. I'm going to have to sort of frantically run on your coat tails and try and hustle up some more money from people. Yeah, I can't. promise you an Oscar for your efforts, but I will be very grateful. You can borrow mine for a week

or two. I'm happy to borrow your Oscar. It's certainly the nearest thing I'm ever going to get near, but it's shocking that you haven't got Oscars for your movies because they depict a particular version of England that I think has really resonated with viewers, Notting Hill, love actually for weddings and a funeral. And you've got a new movie out, an animated movie which actually launches on Netflix called That Christmas. And I wanted to to ask you, which is a better actor, an animated figure or Hugh Grant? I mean, it's hard to think of anyone who isn't a better actor than Hugh Grant. So I don't think that's really fair.

But, you know, I mean, to give you a proper answer, this little movie that we've done that Christmas has a lot of kids in it. There is sort of a lot. And I'm so glad that's the kids movie I made because the faces are just so unbelievably expressive and I think when children make movies it's quite tough to they're like 60 adults looking at them one Thursday and the great thing about an animated movie is you can get the kids in 10 times to do all the lines again and again and the little faces are so expressive they kind of can do four emotions in four seconds so I think an animated version of Hugh Grant would definitely be a better

actor of the appeal Hugh Grant I think I do want to tell people they should should go on to YouTube and look at Hugh's introduction speech for your Oscar last week, because it's one of the funniest things I've seen for a long time. He calls you every swear word that a British person can under the sun that he can get. I thought there'd be some concession to the occasion, but no, it's just seven minutes of hardcore hostility. It is, but it's the British way. I feel like from my perspective, hello, we haven't, I'm such a big fan.

How lovely to meet you. It's so lovely to meet you. I watch Notting Hill at least once or twice a year without fail. It's one of my favorite movies of all time. How's it holding up? It holds up beautifully. For me, I cry at the end every single time without fail. And I'm a very single person.

Well, thank you very much. I probably owe you money, but I don't know how the funding works now would you actually get rewarded to you? We can just go directly. It's just a direct Venmo. I feel like in some ways that you and your movies are fully, responsible for like American anglophilia. Are you responsible for that because your depictions of London at Christmas time? I feel like we are all moving. That's the one we want. Is that how it is in

real life? Please tell me yes. I don't know the official statistics from the Office of Tourism. I have been told by people who work down the street in Notting Hill that it's still helpful. And if you, the little blue door that Hugh Ostensby lives behind, there's still people taking photographs in front of it. So I think there is an element of that. And, you know, London is beautiful. And it's not like I'm made up any of those places. And so I think if people come to London, they will, you know, find a lot of what we portray. But it obviously is a fairly optimistic view of a very complex city. I think I have to come clean. Although Joanna tells me that boxing day is it not a good day and that it's cold and wet and everyone's muddy. And having hailed from Canada, I can agree with that. Yeah, no, Christmas, you know, the big in my new animated movie, it's snowing.

And that happens about once a century now in the UK. So yeah, don't raise your hopes up too high. So have you, Richard, have you met Ellen DeGeneres yet? Because she's moved to the Cotswls. And she's obviously moved because she thinks it's going to be like a really. Richard Curtis movie. I'm concerned she's going to get there and it's not going to be. Well, the consulves are particularly pretty and I haven't met her there and I think she'll be delighted how few people recognize her in the Cotswolds. If she was worried about being hassled

by autograph seekers, I think I can put her mind at rest. Very funny. So I do want to ask you one thing because I remember, I left London just as you were making Notting Hill. And I did see that one of your children had suggested that actually Notting Hill didn't age as well as you would have expected it to. And she was sort of in the way that only children can be sort of talking about what she felt was missing in Notting Hill or Love actually, the depiction of Britain. And I wondered if you'd felt that she was right. Yeah, I'm, you know, I support Scarlett completely. I don't think you can make a movie in whenever we made Notting Hill 1997 and expect to. it to be, you know, up to scratch in terms of things like diversity and some of the jokes.

And certainly she comes hard at me for lots of stuff in love, actually. And I think she's right. There are things that I would write differently now, things that I would say differently now. So I don't think it was a mistake then, but I think there are one or two things which are off-color now. Well, I'm still going to watch Natting Hill with my family and we're going to enjoy it thoroughly. That's okay, too. You know, in lots of World War movies, two movies, all the Germans are bad. And we know there are lots of nice Germans. So things change.

And I think I'm really grateful for your understanding and tolerance. Yeah. And I remember once, actually, when we were doing an interview, I want to say 30, 35 years ago, you talked about one of the criticisms of your movies had been that they focused on family and love, instead of being big, violent, die-hard type movies. And I remember you saying, and the audience. was very moved by it. It was at the Hay Festival. You said, well, you write about the things that actually are important to people, which are relationships and love and friendship. And friendship

often doesn't get enough attention, I think, in the movies. And that actually those were the movies. And you referred to the sound of music as a family escaping Nazis. What could be more moving than that? Well, look, I mean, I do think, if there were as many serial killers as is implied by the output of movies, most of us would be living with a serial killer. So I do think that to write about something as ordinary as family and friendship and love is just fine because I think there are millions of us in the thick of that. But it doesn't mean I don't like really admire movies that deal with more tricky things. And some of my favorite movies are really tricky movies.

What are your favorite movies? What are the top five Richard Curtis movies to watch? The ones in my wheelhouse that I love this century are, I do sort of know this. I loved worst person in the world. I loved a movie that Felicity Jones was in called Like Crazy. I love 500 Days of Summer. But then, you know, there's a movie called The Sun's Room, which is the saddest Italian movie ever made.

I love that. There's a brutal movie called Lillia Forever, which is a Swedish movie about sex trafficking that I think is just bewilderingly powerful. So there's a French movie called Lette Mertrielle. But the movies I used to love, and the ones that made me right. That's breaking away. Do you remember that amazing cycling movie?

Oh, I remember that movie. That's how beautiful. And Dinah and Gregory's girl. So I've seen lots of movies that I've liked a lot of them. In your acceptance speech for your Oscar last week, you talked about the power of narrative to change a society's perspective on something. You talked about Philadelphia for AIDS. You talked about Erin Brockovich for the environment.

What are the sort of subjects that you think could be tackled now in big narrative? What's missing from the movies right now? Wow. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if it's what's missing. I mean, I remember there was this amazing movie called Raining Stones that Ken Loach made, which was, I think, about parents trying to buy their daughter a christening dress or something. But I thought, I've learned more from watching that movie about the texture of what it feels like not to have enough money,

you know, than reading a million articles in The Guardian. So I do think that, you know, to write about poverty is really interesting, to write about, you know, in these days about how intolerance hits us. And then the big challenge that everyone's really hoping that we'll crack again and again is to make the whole climate issue somehow narratively alive, which is quite hard because it's so epic and quite how it hits us as individuals is harder to, you know, to put. put a finger on. But, you know, I think that it should be one of the great endeavors to see whether or not you can make a movie that changes people's hearts and minds. And then, as you know, Joanne, I'm then obsessed once we do that with the kind of idea of impact producers. I'm really this idea of once you've made a good movie to try and get it out there. Because I think sometimes we sit back and hope for change rather than, as it were, fighting for it.

Well, so explain a little bit about what an impact producer is. And then let's talk about some of the work you've done with comic relief, where your idea for it came from, and how it actually has merged with another idea of comic relief in the US. But talk to us about impact producing. What is it? Let me give you an example. I think there was a movie about,

I think it was, I think it's called The Invisible War about rape in the American Armed Forces. And the people who made that movie, as it were, took on some impact producers and they organized a screening in the Pentagon for everyone in the Pentagon compulsory to watch this film and the result of that was that every soldier

who joins the American Armed Forces now part of their training is to watch that movie so that they actually went to the heart of the issue and got a change so they weren't hoping they were as it were directing it and I think that's what I mean that when you make a movie It's so puzzling. When you watch a TV show about, let's say, a complex mental health issue, it says afterwards, if you have been affected by this, go to this website. But it never says

if you would like to have an effect on changing this. If you'd like to be part of the battle against this, then join this campaigning group. Look at these charities. These things are interesting. Right to this minister or everything. There's that strange feeling that, and particularly now, when we're watching so much online. It's a button to press. It was harder 50 years ago. You had to pick up the phone and look up the Samaritans and make a phone call. But now, if you see something that moves you, you should be able to very swiftly act on it.

And that would be what impact producers do. And even, you know, take a movie I mentioned, like Barbie, you know, which is just a brilliant, as it were, outpouring of feminine positivity. I don't know whether or not they say. well, how can we use this for girls in schools? How could we repackage it? Has it been edited so that it could be used in the right kind of way? You know, it's stuff like that. It's just say put a tiny bit of your budget aside and when the movie is finished, use it for activism, charity, law change rather than just saying, there it is. Let's hope something comes of it.

We're not going the final lap having run the marathon and making a movie. We don't sort of come into the stadium and take full advantage of it. Exactly, and you're not taking advantage of the emotion that's stirred up in someone, which you can channel into actually doing something. Tell us a little bit about comic relief. Where did you get the idea from? And what is it? Because I think some people get confused with the British comic relief and then there was an American comic relief. And now you've brought them together and you've raised over $2 billion, which is an extraordinary achievement.

Many congrats and you got the Oscar for it last week. For people who've not heard of comic relief, can you explain, you know, what is it? This was a strange thing. Literally, two different pairs of people were sitting at two different tables on the same day, I think, in 1986 and thought of the same pome. So we were over here and we thought, Comic Relief, after Live Aid, let's do a comedy seven-hour telethon and give the money to a variety of charities. Meanwhile, someone in America, who might have been Billy Crystal or Whoopi Goldberg or Robin Williams, thought, Comet Relief, there's a good wordplay. And so at exactly the same time, not knowing each other, they set up the brilliant Comet Relief, which was a series of concerts on HBO year after year for homeless.

What happened is in the UK, we got very institutionalized. I mean that in a good way, and we added the name Red Nosed Day. And what happened is, it became something that every kid in every school did, and there was lots of programming on the BBC, and we've gone on with our version of comic relief, the climax of which is Red Nose Day. Meanwhile, in America, eventually, comic relief for homelessness, wound down after, I don't know, about 12 years or something like that.

And what happened is we decided it would be brilliant to bring Red Nose Day to America. We had the name Comet Relief. So, as it were, which was relatively dormant. And so what's happened is that we took the name of Comic Relief. We'd done Red Nose Day on the strength of that. And now Comic Relief, you know, is like the gala moving into new areas of fundraising and the cash is going to all sorts of projects across America and across the world.

That is amazing. I can't believe that happened. Yeah. No, we could have sued each other. Instead, we decided to become friends. Just obliterate each other. Yeah. And so I'm excited because this year's gala is actually not a traditional gala.

It's actually a live show. And we've got Billy Crystal. We've got Whoopi Goldberg. We've got Matt Friend. We've got Phoebe Robinson, who I absolutely love. We've got Amy Schumer. We've got Al Jankvich. It's an incredible lineup.

It's going to be a very funny show. You can still get tickets for it. All the proceeds go to comic relief. it's a jazz at Lincoln Center on December the 9th. And I want to make sure that we're giving the right address for people if they want to buy tickets. It's comic relief.org. Would it be over claiming, Joanna, to say that it's going to be the best night in the history of entertainment? I think that one.

I think it is. I think it is. I think it could be. And to get that and to be doing good. I mean, the idea, I'm so moved by the idea of, you know, Billy and Whoopie, and that I think some of Robin Williams's family is turning out. And they were so unbelievable when covert release started in American, so brilliant and so funny.

And the idea of bringing that team back together again, as it were, in the bosom of these distant cousins who are now in America, I think it's going to be, you know, very touching and I hope very funny, I particularly, the idea that weird Al Yankovitz is going to be there. Now, this is a guy. Most people write one funny song. That's just it. as you are one-hit wonder, but Weird Al has written more punnyed funny songs than anyone else. I think he's a legendary figure as well.

And my friend Alex Adelman is on and I adore him and he's so smart amongst other things. So, yeah, I think if anyone wants to know the best thing to do this Christmas, I would strongly recommend avoiding love actually. I think that's a wasted night. That's a wasted night and so, and, you know, a cheat date, full of, you know, unwanted sexist remarks. And instead, go online, look at this great show. Come and I think it's going to be a marvelous evening. Yeah, come and come and join everybody.

And also, if Hugh Grant turns up, obviously we'll have security on the door. He won't be allowed in. No, I mean, you don't need him anywhere near any charitable. No. I'll be your Hugh Grant spotter, so I'll keep my eyes peeled. Well, he's a horror movie hack now. He's a horror movie hack. Richard, thank you for joining us.

And I'm really excited for the gala. December the 9th, jazz at Lincoln Center, extraordinary lineup of comedians, which is a great testament to the work that you've done with comic relief. But if you can join us, do. And also, I think, a great way of either entertaining your family, because you don't have to talk to them, or entertaining your clients

because you don't have to talk to them and you will laugh a lot which goodness knows we need to laugh that'll do and you know getting through Christmas without trying to help other people is a shame Hugh Grant he's Scrooge

don't go there don't go there be with you know Keir and I'd Leanne Emma Thompson and all the sweet people who want to help others yeah and the dear late Alan Rickman but extraordinarily good in love actually well thank you very much for that

Samantha, very good to meet you. So good to meet you. Congratulations on having been funny for however many years it is, but I've got a feeling it's at least 20. Bless you. Thank you. I think, you know, we can all stop now. Let's become an impact producer. Exactly.

You can. Well, our impact is to drive people to attend the gala. Yeah, exactly. And if you can't attend the gala, give to comic relief because you know that the money will 100% go to extraordinarily well-run causes. Please. Yeah.

Well, lovely, see you both. Have a great show. Merry Christmas. Want to hear more? Subscribe to the Daily Beast podcast, wherever you're listening to this to catch a new episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh,

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