John Cleese on Polanski, the coronation, rebooting Fawlty Towers, joining GB News, Putin, the impending apocalypse and the ‘2 or 3 people’ who are funnier than him – a very unguarded interview

Jul 1 , 2023

British comedian John Cleese. Photo: Handout

“Ask me anything,” begins John Cleese, with the warm, knowing smile of someone certain that whatever he’s asked, his interlocutor won’t be short of sound bites 20 minutes later. Indeed, it sometimes seems like the British comedian need only open his mouth for a fresh ripple of indignation-stoking headlines to reverberate across the internet.

In the weeks before we talk alone, Cleese prompted tabloid meltdowns over his decidedly anti-woke decision to ignore a request from the cast to cut a scene mocking a trans female character from an upcoming Life of Brian stage adaptation, and the dubious counter claim that he “can’t be cancelled”. He might never admit it, but given his relentless readiness to drop controversial clangers, one can’t help but think the 83-year-old bard of comedy is privately rather proud of his enduring ability to attract attention. “It’s partly because our media is so unremittingly trivial,” he counters, “and there’s nothing one can do about that.”

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British actor John Cleese performs during rehearsals of his one man show titled A Ludicrous Evening with John Cleese … or How to Finance Your Divorce at the Oslo Concert House, in Oslo, Norway, in 2009. Photo: EPA

My favourite recent teacup storm, though, was Cleese’s irreverent commentary on the coronation of King Charles. “I watched for about five seconds and I just started to laugh uncontrollably – and I mean I really laugh, like remember when you were a teenager and you’d just laugh until it hurts?” recalls Cleese, writhing with childlike delight. What he saw was “straight out of a Monty Python” sketch. A scene so ridiculous that he might have dreamed it up himself for the iconoclastic comedy troupe, which redefined the art of making people laugh over four iconic films, released over a dozen years from 1971. “All these people in silly costumes behaving as if something very serious is going on,” he continues. “I just thought it was hilarious.”

Rob Reiner is one of the two or three people who know more about comedy than I do … That’s a very arrogant thing to say

However, it’s the return of Cleese’s other legendary comedy creation that’s prompting the happiest headlines, with plans to revive the beloved Fawlty Towers sitcom – some 44 years after Cleese last appeared as the iconic grump Basil Fawlty. But why now? “They asked if we could do it, and I gave the answer I’ve been giving for 40 years,” says Cleese, “which is that I don’t really see how it could possibly be a success.” However, wined and dined by a US producer, his mind was changed over the course of a single dinner. Cleese and his daughter Camilla have signed on to co-write the reboot – although he’s quick to pour cold water all over it. At present, there is no script, no concept, no location, and no characters apart from Basil. Cleese’s first wife, co-writer and co-star Connie Booth, is notably not involved. It will “probably be set in the Caribbean”, he concedes.

The cast of Fawlty Towers, including John Cleese (top) and Connie Booth (seated, centre). Photo: Handout

“We don’t have an idea yet – we have half an idea,” Cleese continues. “The trouble is one of the producers wanted to promote himself a little bit and sent out a press release without warning anyone, and suddenly everyone got excited over something that hardly exists.”

The excitement is understandable though – the show will unite Cleese with Rob Reiner, the American director behind legendary music mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, whom Cleese regards as among the “only two or three people who know more about comedy” than him. “That’s a very arrogant thing to say,” he admits unapologetically. (Later, when pushed, he adds Steve Martin, Eddie Izzard aka Suzy Izzard, and Frank Oz to that list.)

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I’m talking to Cleese ahead of a solo stand-up tour of Asia – which lands in Hong Kong on July 10. We last spoke almost exactly a decade earlier, when he was dragging a similar show around the globe in a self-confessed money grab following an infamous third divorce in 2008, which left him shouldering alimony payments of more than US$20 million. (Camilla was born to second wife Barbara Trentham; he married for a fourth and so-far final time in 2012.)

Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with John Cleese in the back row on the left, in 1972. Photo: Handout

But the last 10 years have been good for Cleese, with 2014 seeing both the publication of So, Anyway …: The Autobiography and the lucrative Monty Python Live (Mostly) reunion. But cash, it seems, remains his principal motivation for life on the road. “People say, ‘why are you still working,’ and I say, ‘have a look at the figures of my third divorce,’” he quips. But surely by now Alyce Faye Eichelberger, his American ex-spouse of 16 years, has been paid off? “Not really. Have you ever paid anyone US$20 million? It’s not a matter of an overnight success,” he retorts. “I’m living in an 11,000 sq ft property in London – when I divorced, I had five properties.”

There’s an enormous amount of things that we should be dealing with and we’re not – we’re going to have an awful lot of very rich people when the planet ceases to exist

If it’s not entirely a quest for coin, then it’s easy to imagine that the haunting echo of an internal ticking clock might be driving Cleese’s late-career workload. Beyond the gruelling grind of stage work, there’s a hectic schedule in front of the camera: he’s currently in the process of launching a news opinion show, opening a west coast comedy club in the US, and adapting two of his classic films into stage shows on different sides of the Atlantic. After this string of shows in Asia and Australia, he’s flying straight to Los Angeles to workshop a theatrical revamp of the 1998 film A Fish Called Wanda, while the headline-baiting Life of Brian musical opens on London’s West End next year.

Jamie Lee Curtis and John Cleese in a scene from A Fish Called Wanda. Photo: Handout

John and his daughter Camilla have also written a movie script, Lookalikes, about celebrity doppelgängers – but with the twist that all the pretend stars are in fact played by the real-life actors themselves. “So Arnold Schwarzenegger will play his own lookalike!” bellows Cleese with glee. Wait, Arnie’s signed up? “No! Nobody’s signed up to it, but we’re sending the script out to people, and casting it will be absolutely essential.”

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Before all that, Cleese will be back on the big screen in September with a starring role in black comedy The Palace, directed by perhaps the longest-cancelled personality in Hollywood history, Roman Polanski, who has lived in exile in Paris since 1978 after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl. Cleese has no qualms.

“I don’t think anyone thinks he’s anything other than one of the greatest filmmakers ever born, and the idea of working with an absolute master was very, very important to me,” he asserts. “Most people, through the course of their life, ruffle a few feathers – and sometimes it’s important, as it was in his case. I don’t think just because someone did something 50 years ago – which the other person involved does not want unearthed – I don’t see any reason that the press are doing it other than it will get lots of clicks.”

Actor John Cleese at the UK premiere of the movie Shrek 2 in Leicester Square, London, in 2004. Photo: AP Photo

Would he work with Woody Allen, then? “The only thing I know is that in any interview I do now – even if it’s about the sexual mating habits of a lemur – cancel culture will come up in the next few minutes,” he says. “And I think that there are more important things than cancel culture, and if I keep feeding it by talking about it we’re going to forget about the important things.

“If people ask, ‘Do you think it’s OK for people to shout nasty things at each other?’ the answer is: no. I agree, it’s not OK, but the question is what we do about it – do we try and legislate to make people better human beings? Because that’s been tried in the past by other forms of puritans and it hasn’t worked very well.”

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Over his career, Cleese has elevated a comedic commentary of current affairs into an art form. But now his forthright – and often downright divisive – views will soon be amplified through the formal, unapologetic megaphone of TV. In the four days before we speak, Cleese taped three episodes of a new show he’s hosting on the UK’s new right-leaning freeview news opinion channel GB News. “I refer to them not as GB News, but as KGB News, and they think that’s rather funny,” he says ominously.

British comedy troupe Monty Python – Eric Idle, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin and Terry Jones – pose for a photo during a media event in London, Britain, in June 2014. Photo: EPA

It might be disappointing to some supporters that Cleese, a long-time Liberal Democrat, has joined a platform whose biggest hit is a show fronted by former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. (Cleese did campaign in favour of Brexit.) “They said to me, ‘you can do absolutely anything you like,’” reveals Cleese. “And no one has ever said that to anyone on television in any time in world history.” Why then was he singled out for this unlikely, unprecedented honour? “I imagine it’s because they recognise my true brilliance,” he replies, with what one hopes is more irony that was immediately obvious.

We’re now so scientifically advanced that we can destroy ourselves in many more ways than we used to. There’s so many reasons that there’s very little hope. At 83, I’m not going to be here much longer – so I’m sorry, it’s your problem

There are two significant honours Cleese did turn down – a peerage to the UK’s non-elected House of Lords, and repeated offers of a knighthood. Given his libertarian beliefs, political track record and recent comments on the coronation, it’s somewhat surprising to hear Cleese mount a half-hearted defence of the British monarchy. “I think it’s very good to have a non-political head of state, but so far as our ex-colonies go, it’s entirely up to them,” he says. “I can’t imagine anything less important to me than someone who doesn’t want to be a member of the Commonwealth any more – fine!”

John Cleese as the recurring character Q in 007 film Die Another Day. Photo: Handout

Speaking of outdated British institutions, Cleese was tapped to play “Q” and “R” in two Pierce Brosnan-era Bond films, but has since proved a consistent critic of the franchise’s deteriorating quality and absence of humour. “They’re caught up in a world where the only thing that matters is each film makes more money than the last one, and if you discover that the audience for Bond films is in the Philippines and Indonesia and South Korea, then there’s not much point putting in humour that’s only going to be appreciated by an audience that speaks English,” he muses, “and I think that’s sad.”

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Cue the (multi-)million dollar question: does Bond have to be played by a white man? “Well, it depends whether you want to have any contact at all with the original books. I suppose there’s no limit to it really. I suppose you could have Cinderella played by a male of colour. I find it very hard to suspend … ,” he pauses, the “uncancellable” comedian perhaps sensing stormy waters ahead.

John Cleese has had a long career spanning TV, film and theatre. Photo: SCMP Archives

“Very few people study history any more, and this means there’s a lot of young people, especially in America, who don’t know any history at all,” he says. “They have no idea what it might have been like to live in a different era. You’ve got to take into account that everything was very tough and very cruel for about 5,000 years of human history, and it’s getting slightly better in a small number of countries – but not necessarily if you’re a Uygur in China or a Ukrainian – but it’s getting slightly better, a little bit at a time.”

I call [it] ‘the war of Putin’s ego’ where a huge amount of resources are being destroyed because one man wants to go down in history

But is it? I’m not convinced. While the past few years may have been good for Cleese, they’ve been horrendous for the rest of us to live through. Has the notoriously deprecatory octogenarian lived through a worse decade on the planet, then?

Members of the Monty Python comedy group, including John Cleese (centre top) in a scene from the 1982 film The Meaning of Life. Photo: AP Photo

“It’s a really serious mess at the moment,” he concedes. “There’s an enormous amount of things that we should be dealing with and we’re not – because the only purpose of most politicians is to hang onto power, and the only purpose of newspapers and television is to turn a profit. I rather doubt that there’s going to be any solution, because we’re going to have to get our egos out of the way before we, for example, stop destroying Brazilian rainforests because we want to make a lot of money. We’re going to have an awful lot of very rich people when the planet ceases to exist.”

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Cleese might have made his name and fortune making people laugh, but as you’ve probably realised by now, in conversation he is anything but light – or funny. When I spoke with him 10 years ago, he was harried and scowling from the back of a black London taxi cab, and came across as a prickly provocateur. But seated in his modest home and looking me in the eye – if through Zoom – it’s a sense of world-weary resignation that greets me today. A bleak torrent of pessimism bubbling from a deep pit of desperation.

Comedian John Cleese performing live in Singapore, in 2022. Photo: Handout

“China is trying to dominate the world, and we’ve got a war that I call ‘the war of Putin’s ego’ where a huge amount of resources are being destroyed because one man wants to go down in history. I mean, the place is a madhouse,” he says, before begrudgingly conceding my premise that, yes, it is the worst era he’s lived through, actually. “We’re now so scientifically advanced that we can destroy ourselves in many more ways than we used to. Everybody is now scared about AI, and I don’t know whether to be. There’s so many reasons – climate is obviously one – that there’s very little hope. My feeling is, at 83, I’m not going to be here much longer – so I’m sorry, Rob, it’s your problem.”

As Cleese’s apocalyptic monologue unravels, the messages from his team telling me my time is up get increasingly incessant. I hasten to wrap up the call, apologising that if I take up any more of his valuable time, I will risk making a lot of people quite angry. His face lights up one last time. “That’s not a bad thing to do,” he laughs mischievously, “not a bad thing to do at all.”

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Fame and celebrity

Over 60 years, the British national treasure revolutionised comedy with Monty Python, starred in Shrek and James Bond films – and after all that, claims he cannot be cancelled
Ahead of his Asia and Australia tour, Cleese opens up about rebooting beloved BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers, acting in Roman Polanski’s The Palace – and why this is the worst era he’s lived through