The voice of SpongeBob, Tom Kenny

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This is Fresh Air, I'm David B. Cooley. The latest Spongebob SquarePants movie, the SpongeBob movie Search for SquarePants, is now streaming on Paramount Plus. And that's reason enough to revisit our interview with Tom Kenny, who has been providing the voice of animation's most celebrated sponge since it premiered on Nickelodeon in nineteen ninety nine.

SpongeBob SquarePants isn't the oldest continually running animated series currently on TV. Comedy Central South Park first appeared two years earlier in nineteen ninety seven. Both shows have launched popular Broadway musicals and movie spinoffs. And, like Fox's The Simpsons, which launched as a series way back in nineteen eighty nine, all have had a major impact on the current generation, which has been watching these shows and characters all their life.

When I teach television history to young twenty somethings in college, the one show with which they are more familiar and fluent than any other is Spongebob Square Paint. They all know and love the antics of SpongeBob and his undersea pals, including Patrick the Starfish, Squidward the Octopus, and Mr. Krab.

All these characters and more were created by Stephen Hillenberg, who was a marine science educator as well as an animator. He died in twenty eighteen at age fifty seven, but his characters and his series live on. In Search for SquarePants, SpongeBob wakes up one morning to discover he's had a small growth spurt, making him thirty-six clams high.

Which, to a sponge who's been waiting all his life to be tall enough to be allowed onto an amusement park ride, is a big deal. As his friend Patrick notes, he's now a big guy. Tom Kenney is the voice of SpongeBob. Bill Fagerbachie is the voice of the starfish Patrick. Patrick, I've never felt so respected before. Get used to it! And do you know what the best part is? Guy is What is it, Patrick? No, I'm asking. It means I finally get

Little guy dreams of doing when they grow up. You don't mean? That's right. Ride the big guy roller coaster. Captain Footy Beard's Fun Park Woohoo Somehow, this leads to an adventure where Spongebob sails away with a nefarious, ghostly flying Dutchman, whose voice is provided by Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame. It's more silly than scary, but between all the sight gags, goofy jokes, and bouncy music, manages to teach subtle lessons about friendship, loyalty, and even maturity.

Tom Kenney as always provides the voice of SpongeBob. Before taking that role, he was a stand up comic and a cast member of mister Show, the HBO sketch series starring Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. He spoke with Terry Gross in two thousand four, when there also was a new Spongebob movie being released.

Let me ask you to describe SpongeBob for someone who's never seen the cartoon. Oh wow, yeah. Uh SpongeBob SquarePants is a little square kitchen sponge, even though he was born of sea sponges. It's kind of an accident of nature. But he lives in a pineapple under the sea. Uh works in a fast food restaurant called the Krusty Crab in the undersea community of Bikini Bottom.

Um, what else can I tell you? He pals around with an incredibly dim starfish named Patrick Star, has a Krabby neighbor named Squidward Tentacles, who lives in a giant tiki head next door to him. He's he's incurably optimistic and enthusiastic and and kinetic and

And uh yeah. And and he has a cartoon show on Nickelodeon. No, if you're doing a a a voice for say a cartoon animal You know, animals make noises, so you could you c you can maybe base your voice on on like a cat's meow or a dog's bark or you know, a beer's growl or something. If you're doing the voice of a human character, humans really speak. If you're doing the voice of a sponge, there's really like nothing in nature to base that on. So how did you figure out what voice you wanted to use?

Which is actually very freeing in a way, because there's no template. So uh when it came time to come up with a voice, it was just a matter of finding a voice that was childlike. Childlike and maybe childish, but not a child, non-age-specific, enthusiastic, and just just kind of weird. And we've finally settled on this. elfish helium helium voice that that SpongeBob wound up being. And you know, this we know that was the fun part was before it was even a pitch or even a show and we were just

You know, sitting in coffee shops irritating people at other tables going, you know, what would he laugh like? What would his laugh be like? And, you know, how about a dolphin? How about kind of like a dolphin? Like Flipper used it, Yeah, that's good and and you know, it was really a blast and then

Steve went in and and pitched it to Nickelodeon and and they uh they liked it. It's a it's the only job in all the hundreds of voiceovers I've done that I I really didn't have to audition for. I had the job from the get go, which was

Nice. You know, it's funny you should mention that in the in the seven minute pilot episode that we did, which as far as we were concerned might be the only episode of SpongeBob ever made. There was a a school of anchovies that invade SpongeBob's restaurant and and you know, just this big school of destruct like locusts, you know, that just descend on the restaurant and go. And Steve Hillenberg actually uh brought a tank of helium into the studio and all of us voice actors just

Pfft stuck suck nom it was it was just that was the pilot. So I said, Boy, if this thing goes, we are gonna have a lot of fun. Did it help to hear what your voice sounded uh like on Heli Helium did you learn something about your voice you didn't know before? Yeah, I learned that I don't really need the helium. 'Cause it's pretty easy to flick that switch and go right up there. Were there voices you came up with for SpongeBob that you rejected? Oh yeah.

animated character in any animated show, you're you're trying to dial in a voice that the creator is hearing in his head. And in the case of SpongeBob and a lot of the shows I've worked on, the creator of the show has a very definitive idea that he sometimes can't articulate'cause he himself is not a voice actor. So really it's a matter of of just

letting yourself be dialed in like a radio or something with the creator going, Okay, no, little little little uh add twenty pounds. Okay, no you know five years younger and uh, you know, maybe he has a deviated septum. Okay, yeah. And you know You know, it it really is hit or miss. You're you're you're zeroing in on this on this target and when it and when it hits Okay, can you just now could you do that for me? Could you add twenty pounds?

To uh to Spongebob's voice. Yeah, which when he absorbs uh water. I g I guess it's water weight. I have a tendency to retain water, Terry. Uh this is SpongeBob on a very I I'm feeling very obese and very large today. And and make him five years younger. Oh, make him five years younger? This is Spongebob as a child. I am in Sponge Kindergarten. Deviated septum? Oh deviated septum. I don't know what that means. I'm just a dumb sponge.

What was it like for you the first time the voice and the image were matched up? You a you actually saw, you know, a little bit of completed animation of SpongeBob with your voice? It was really great'cause like I said, I I had gone over to Steve's house, you know, even before the the pitch was a pitch and and he had drawings and watercolored paintings of SpongeBob's pineapple house and Squidward's Tiki Headhouse and the Krusty Crab restaurant which looks like an overturned lobster trap and

They were just so beautiful. It was you know, it was like looking into an aquarium or something. He had th they were just gorgeous. And then when I started to do informal focus group testing at my house uh you know, translation, forcing people that drop by to watch my cartoon pilot. Sit on, we're watching SpongeBob. The clamps come out of the arms of the chair. Psh But uh you know, people really

liked it more than they usually like a cartoon, especially kids, they liked it more than a little bit. They they were just entranced and and wanted more. And and luckily Nickelodeon uh took a took a flyer on on it as a series.

No no the m the movie the SpongeBob movie is kind of a musical. There's a bunch of songs in it. Uh you sing a couple and one of the songs you sing in the movie is called The Best Day Ever. Before we hear it. Can you talk a little bit about what it's like to sing in character? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. Boy, I've never I've never talked about that before.

Some voices really lend themselves to to singing and even though it w I didn't really think about it ahead of time, uh it's it's just serendipitous that Spongebob did, uh, it's it's pretty easy to sing in that voice. My dog has fleas. But you know, there are other voices that I've done where I'm just so glad I don't have to sing in them.

You know, if if you're doing that guy there's not a lot of there's not not a lot of Sondheim like range that you can uh tap into. But but yeah, Sponge Spongebob really, really is fun to sing as. It's sort it's sort of like a weird mix between, you know Jerry Lewis and the guy from the the Schlock seventies band Sticks, you know, it it it's it's it's kinda babe I'm leaving, must be on my It's it's very weird. Uh w where do you place that voice in your head?

Uh in my boy, that that I would have to say that if I were going to uh draw a circle around the target area, it would be somewhere between my fairly sizable uh proboscis and um and my thorax. It's it's definitely it's definitely up. up in the nasal cavity back of the throat area and Bill Fagerbachy that does the voice of or it's Foggerbach or Fagerbachie, he's never told me how to pronounce his name. He says, whatever. I I'm not fuzzy, whatever.

But you know, his voice as Patrick is just is just all pushed down right into his big barrel chest. And then SpongeBob is way up here. So it's it's kind of a n a neat contrast between uh between SpongeBob and Patrick Starfish. Well Tom Kenny, let's hear you sing. And this is from the soundtrack of the SpongeBob SquarePants movie. And uh here's Tom Kenny singing The Best Day Ever, uh that song you co wrote. Yes, I did, with Andy Paley, Power Pop Meister. Okay, here it comes.

That's Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob and the star of the SpongeBob SquarePants movie. So so you actually wrote The Best Day Ever, which we just heard. Tell us a bit about your approach to writing a song for Spongebob to sing.

You know, it was this really fun mental exercise where my friend Andy Paley and I and you know, if you Google Andy Paley, it's insane. He's he's produced records by Jerry Lee Lewis and, you know, Brian Wilson and, you know, all these people. But it was very freeing to to just put on SpongeBob's brain and say, Wow, well Spongebob is

this unbridled optimist. He you know, he jumps out of bed every day and greets the new day with the mantra, this is gonna be the best day ever. You know, i every day has the potential to be the best day ever, which is you know, how we'd all like to be and then we're by the time we walk out the front door we're beaten into s submission by life. But yeah, it was really fun and and we tried to make the song sound like you know, we were trying to figure out who

in rock and roll history has been most in touch with their inner SpongeBob. And you know, and it's John Sebastian from the Love and Spoonful. You know, do you but you know, he is SpongeBob. Do you leave believe in magic? You know, uh Brian Wilson, where you know, who will write like this beautiful four-minute opus about the wind chimes. These are my wind chimes.

You know, and it's like, well, you know, they they sort of have this nafe like child man sort of sensibility that is SpongeBob. So it's like, let's write a love and spoonful Brian Wilson pet sounds, you know, sort of thing.

With SpongeBob singing it and that's where Best Day Ever came from. So what were the cartoons you grew up with? Oh man, I was obsessed with Popeye the Sailor Man as a kid. I think, I don't know, six or seven Halloween in a row I was Popeye the Sailor Man. Which, you know, is a pitch that probably would not fly now. You know, you go into the big cartoon network and go, Okay, he's a sailor and his eye has been poked out and he likes to punch people. What do you think? you know?

But Oh, and the and the real thing is he eats spinach. He eats spinach and then he gets strong and this enables him to punch people harder and f and beat them up more completely. What do you think? But uh it was uh Popeye the Sailor Man and it was a particular honor for me when SpongeBob and Popeye shared a cover of TV Guide as uh they did the a series of covers.

featuring the top fifty cartoon characters ever. And they they had a a cover drawing that was Popeye the Sailor Man drawing his anchor up out of the water and it's caught on SpongeBob's underwear and he's just kinda hanging off the anchor looking at Popeye. It was it was it was a weird kind of I don't know, like full circle cosmic moment for me. I started cry I started crying in the grocery store. That's all I'm gonna say, Terry.

So so when you were a kid and you loved Popeye, did you do the Popeye voice and that kind of Popeye mumble that he's always doing as he's walking and thinking? I loved that. Yeah, that that thing that uh Jack Mercer, the voice of Popeye, you know, he was Popeye for for eighty years or something, you know, he was incredible. And I also loved the l you know, the Looney Tunes, you know, Bugs and Daffy of course and, you know, Bullinkle and Rocky uh were were huge for me and

And even those early Hanna Barbera cartoons like Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound and Topcat, you know, they they had even when the animation was fairly limited, the voice work was really great. And from a really

early age I was I was conscious of the fact that there were grown grown men whose job it was to help bring these these things to life. And it seemed like a really fun job to me. I I had a an aunt, a a very a very uh hap aunt who when I was a kid gave me a bunch of Stan Freeberg record albums like uh history of the United States and all that. And they had little bio biographies of the of the voice actors on the back of the album, like, you know, Stan Freeberg, June Foray, Dawes Butler

you know, people like that and y they were amazing. I I was very aware that there was a guy named Mel Blank whose name was on every cartoon. But you know, pre internet uh in the in the pre Internet world it was it was kinda hard to to find out about that stuff. Y you had you had to sort of feel your way around. But that only made it more kinda mysterious, you know. I I I liked uh I don't know, I felt like it there was this whole hidden world of of

needed to be uncovered by me. So did you have a sense when you were a kid that you wanted to to to be a voice actor?

I did, yeah, I did. And and by the time I was a teenager, it was firmly in place. In fact, uh one of my best friends from first grade on is the comedian Bobcat Goldthwaite. And w we met in first grade and and you know, are still close at forty two years old or whatever. And uh He reminded me recently of a conversation that he and I had in high school, like just kinda you know, kind of walking around your hometown where there's no show business.

and playing this game of whose career do you want? If if you could have anybody's career in show business, who would you want? And this was probably seventy six or seventy eight. And Bob reminded me of this conversation we had had where he said John Belushi and I said Mel Blank. Hm. And he's and he said, Wow, isn't that weird that you you know, y you sort of you sort of did it. You're doing you know, you're doing the same kind of work that Mel Blank did and

I said, Yeah, that is weird. Like I I wanted to be an astronaut and I I kinda got to go up in space a a couple of times. It's cool. I don't know how Bobcat Goldthwaite still manages to have a voice because the voice the voice that he does sounds like it would just rip up your vocal cords. Yeah, I know. I don't either. He has a he has vocal cords of steel. He is more he is more than human.

But yeah, he's he's we met in first grade. Um we went to the same Catholic school, but we were in We were in separate first grades and the first time I became aware of Bob was when uh the nun that taught his classroom just dragged him by the ear into the nun that taught my classroom and his nun was crying and she just threw him into the classroom and said, I can't take him anymore, sister, you have to th this Goldwaite boy out of And I said, Whoa I

I have to get to know this boy who can make a grown nun cry. It was it was really bizarre. And so him and I he was the only other kid that had an interest in that. left field kinda, you know, stand up and and sketch comedy and when S C T V came on the air it totally blew our minds and we went to see Andy Kaufman perform in Syracuse when when we were and, you know, it was cool to have another

was into that stuff so you knew that you weren't crazy.'Cause again now, you know, uh a kid can get on the the internet and just, you know, immediately be in touch with, you know, how many hundreds of like minded uh square pegs. But You know. It wasn't that way back in the seventies. We had to find other nerds to talk to. Ourselves. Th there was one there's one

Uh there's one really funny memory I have. You know, I was Bob was the quintessential uh fat kid that was the class clown, and I was the quintessential shy skinny kid who didn't have the guts to be class clown but considered himself the class clown's head writer.

You know, I mean Hey, try this during math class, Bob, it'll work for you. You know, that's a good sound. Try that one. But uh you know, I have a great memory of of us in gym class and they were picking teams for basketball and of course Bob and I were both just hopeless at sports and you know, try funny as a as a as a as a defense mechanism, that old that old chestnut. And it came down they were picking teams and everyone got picked except Bob And myself. And this little girl who had a hook.

for a hand. And Bob and I just look at each other and uh the kid the captain of the other team says, I'll take Susie And but and she walked the girl with the hook for the hand walked over to play hoops. And Bob and I just looked at each other and just

started laughing unka you know, these like, you know, fourth graders just just laughing our heads off at how stupid and hopeless we were. Even now I can't explain how you know, how perfect that moment was where it's just you and your other nerdy friend and the girl with the hook and sh the girl with the hook goes off to play basketball and they're going, Yeah, Tom and Bob uh it doesn't really matter what team they're on, they're just there to make us laugh anyway.

Tom Kenney speaking to Terry Gross in two thousand four. After a break, we'll continue their conversation, and we'll have two reviews. I'll review Prime Video's Man on the Run, the new Morgan Neville documentary about Paul McCartney, and film critic Justin Chang reviews Dreams, the new psychological drama starring Jessica Chastain. I'm David Bouley, and this is Fresh Air.

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Do you remember the first voices that you started doing that made you realize that you could do it? You know, like I said, I was kind of shy up until uh junior high school and it wasn't until then that I started to kind of step out and and think that maybe, you know, maybe I could be funny in front of more people than my handful of selected trusted friends.

So um you know, I wasn't really you know, I wasn't really walkka waka kookie guy in class. I I I had this secret desire to be, w which makes the world of of cartoon voiceover perfect for me'cause you know, if you're simultaneously a little bit shy and also an annoying, irritating show off at the same time, it it's the perfect it's the perfect gig.

Do y do you have a favorite theme song f from all the cartoon shows? Oh man, I love Topcat. I thought that that uh Topcat the revisible leader of the gang. You know, that was just such a Such a cool, snappy, rat packy And and you know, when I was thinking about it, I realized that all those Hanna Barbera cartoon characters that I grew up with as a kid. We're basically Neer do well conmen.

You know, Topcat lived in an alley and him and his buddies were always stealing from garbage cans and hiding from the cops, you know.

Like our our market research shows us that children enjoy grifters. Let's make a cartoon series about them. It's like, you know, Yogi Bear is always stealing picnic baskets. It's like, you know, they were they were all they were all con men and crooks. They they were all they had this Sergeant Bilko uh whiff of illegality about them that I was responding to and for some reason.

Nate, you did a lot of stand up comedy, uh too. And what what was your stand up act like? You know, uh boy, I wish I remembered it. It it was uh I guess very kinetic, pop culture oriented, also a lot of stories about just people I had met or seen or people in my family or you know, it sort of lent itself Club owners occasionally did not appreciate, hey, your your act is different than it was the first show. You gotta do the same thing you did the first show.

Well th I get bored. I don't wanna do it. Wha what's the point if uh if you can't throw some stuff against the wall and if it doesn't stick, well Those are the breaks. I don't tell you how many cases of Heineken to order. Get off my case. But uh when I was growing up, all the comics like so many of the comics did impressions and they did impressions of people who who

um they must have grown up with but you know, like James Cadney and Al Jolson and then contemporary politicians like J F K and Nixon uh were were thrown in there. Et Sullivan yeah, right. Everybody had to do Et Sullivan. Um Did s did you grow up with any of that and was did you ever do impressions? Impressions just aren't what they used to be. Very few people do impressions in their act anymore.

Yeah, and and especially, you know, I was doing standup comedy, you know, I started in eighty three or so as a as a rank open micer and To us, I I don't know, m maybe we were like snot nosed little wise guys, but but to us, people like me and Bobcat, like the impression guys were

There was just something kinda square about it. There was just something kinda corny like, uh, hey, here's you know, what if Jack Nicholson was on Star Trek? You know, it was it was just some sorta sorta uh who cares, you know, who you know, who cares? So Uh impressions were really not of much interest. To me and

Maybe because I'm not very good at them myself. Uh maybe it's just sour grapes, because there are voiceover guys that I work with every day that are just have the most incredible ears and incredible radar for doing these uncanny impressions, not just of huge celebrities, but celebrities that you would think

you couldn't do an impression of. Like, you know, my friend Billy West, who's like a monster cartoon voice guy. He you know, he was ran and Stimpy and a bazillion other characters, including Popeye currently. But he uh You know, he'll do like a dead on Charlie Sheen. And you go, wow, I didn't know there was enough to sh Charlie Sheen to do an impression of. Wow, that's really cool. And I never had that

I never had that skill. I you know, my strength was always creating characters out of whole cloth and looking at a drawing or a picture and kinda figuring out what You know, what these things might sound like By the same token though, a lot of my cartoon voices that I've actually been hired to do. have been the result of my highly unsuccessful and lame attempts at impressions. Like who?

You know, like well I'll do an impression that's so terrible that it sounds like an original voice. You know, people go, Wow, we we haven't heard that before. That's very good And I'll go, Well, I was trying to do uh, you know, this person or that person but Or sometimes they're amalgams like the series The Powerpuff Girls.

you know, has this ineffectual mayor of the town who didn't welcome to Townsville, ladies and gentlemen. That's sort of an amalgam of my bad impressions of uh Frank Morgan, the Wizard of Oz. and Joe Flynn, the guy from McHale's navy, I'm gonna toss you in the break for this, Mikhail and and uh, you know, uh

uh who is the woman, uh Ruth Gordon, you know, in her later years in the w those awful movies with Clint Eastwood and an orangutan. Get that monkey out of my Oreos, you know. So it's like there's there's three horrible weak attempts and impressions that that actually turned into an employment opportunity for me. How did you break into voice work?

You know, fortuitously I was doing stand up one night at the at the now defunct improv in Santa Monica and there was a person from Nickelodeon and also a person from what was then Hanna Barbera in the audience and and they they both approached me th the same night and said it was a showcase. And they said, Jeez, have you ever thought about

doing animated voices for cartoons. And I said, uh, you know, maybe every day of my life perhaps. Where do I sign? And uh yeah, that was it was it was great. I really felt like, you know, once I did the first uh a couple of them. The first one or two were extremely terrifying. And then I felt like I had just found this this suit that fit me so well. It was it was like, wow, this is this is what I was looking for. You know, this this feels

even much better and writer to me than stand up does. It was it was it was a blast. What is the most devious thing you have ever done with your voice?

Oh boy. That is that is very weird. Um Well I have to say occasionally. parents who are uh uh maybe a little uh pushy will will Voice their kid on you and just say, This is Mr. Kenny, he does SpongeBob, do Spongebob, do Spongebob for Timmy, Mr. Kenny, do SpongeBob, do Spongebob, do Spongebob. And then you do the voice, and the kid just You know, they're two years old so they don't understand why this is a good idea.

man with three day stubble is yammering SpongeBob in their face. It's terrifying for them. So that's kind of unwittingly uh evil on my part, but I sorta get I sort of get horn swaggled into it but I just know that that kid is gonna be on a psychiatrist couch somewhere down the line. So tell me again then the sponge man yelled in your face. But but uh and that made you cry?

But it's uh It's weird. And then and then there's another school of of kid who finds out what you do and just comes up with this sense of demanding entitlement and starts poking you and going, Talk SpongeBob, talk SpongeBob, talk SpongeBob. It's it's weird. And then you just say, All right, I'll talk SpongeBob. Why don't you go to your parents and ask them to teach you some manners? Do you ever get recognized by your voice since you don't really use your real voice in your work? Thank you.

No, actu actually this is a character that I'm doing right now. This is uh yeah, this is this is really hard for me to do right now. No, my real voice is kind of just uninteresting and vanilla and, you know, nasal, you know, Syracuse accent and You know, if I if I didn't if I wasn't able to twist it into into various uh various shapes You know, I'd be working in a store.

Like I see guys like James Earl Jones and they've got the voice. They've got that voice and it's what they do and it's a you know It's a gold mine. It's a you know, if if i if I say Darth Vader's lines, it doesn't have the same uh it doesn't have the same cachet. Hey, I find your lack of faith disturbing. Okay. I must have those plans.

But you know, so you know, like the guy that does the trailers in a world where a man's voice goes down at the end of every sentence. It's a it's like wow that guy really talks like that. I've I've I've run into that guy. That really is his voice. And he r and he really does do the thing where he goes down, then. Like in promos, you listen to promos and you realize that it's all about the word then.

You know, on a very special C S I Toledo, then on Buffy Then on a very special pretty people in their twenties, cellulite is discovered on Sarah with a you know Have you really met that guy? I have, yeah, yeah, man. He gets a lot of work. He's the guy. I mean i there's it's him. You walk around, you go, Wow. Yeah, yes, I'm ready for my car now. It's like

I l I love it, you know. Like I can make fun of that but I can't really do it. Well you just you know and and you have to be able to reference the word masterpiece in Illimitable ways, you know, it's been called a small masterpiece. Critics are calling it some kind of a masterpiece. It's being hailed as a masterpiece.

It's like wow, if everything's a masterpiece, that makes everything's sort of generic. If it's all a masterpiece, it's uh it's all uh yeah. Well Tom Kenny, it's just been great talking with you. Thank you so much. And thank you very much, Terry. What force was that?

That was uh that was uh that was my Mr. Haney uh hillbilly voice from Green Acres. I don't know. No, I think that was I did interviews all day today voice. That's uh that's Phlem. That's that's Mr. Phlem, my new character that I'm working on. Tom Kenney speaking to Terry Gross in two thousand four. The Spongebob movie Search for SquarePants is now streaming on Paramount Plus. Coming up, I review Prime Video's Man on the Run, the new Morgan Neville documentary about Paul McCartney.

This is fresh air. Over the years at NPR's Fresh Air, we've gotten to talk with a lot of great filmmakers. Now we've made a playlist of some of our favorites, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Ava Duvernay, Mel Brooks, Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and others. Find all our new playlists and more at FreshAirplus at plus.npr.org slash fresh air. This week on the MPR politics podcast, the CBS It's really the first time I can remember so many of these organizations.

This week on the MPR Politics Podcast. Listen on the MPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Consider This, President Trump says that he's thinking about a possible strike. In Congress, Senator Tim Kane of Virginia is moving to ensure that President Trump cannot do that alone. Listen for more on Consider This on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast.

Today on Prime Video, the new documentary Man on the Run makes its streaming premiere. It's about Sir Paul McCartney, but it's not about his years with the Beatles. Instead, it's about his first years without them. Yes, there have been plenty of Beatles related documentaries in the past decade or so, and yes, I've reviewed most of them. But in my defense, the Beatles are a great subject, musically and biographically, and the best filmmakers are drawn to them.

Peter Jackson gave us the Get Back documentary miniseries and the latest installment of the Beatles anthology. Ron Howard directed eight days a week about the group's touring year. Martin Scorsese directed Living in the Material World, his two part biography of George Harrison. All of them were terrific, and all of them were made by Oscar winning directors. Documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville, who won an Oscar for his film about backup singers twenty feet from stardom, has joined that club.

He's already directed outstanding biographies of everyone from Johnny Cash and Anthony Bourdain to Steve Martin and Fred Rogers. And now Prime Video is premiering his latest documentary, Man on the Run, about former Beatle Paul McCartney. And the word former is key here. While brief, artful montages encapsulate the frenzy and impact of Beatlemania, Man on the Run is focused on the decade immediately afterward, the nineteen seventies.

Specifically, it spans the period from when McCartney left the Beatles to when his former bandmate, John Lennon, was shot and killed. Neville conducted many lengthy new interviews with McCartney, but uses only the sound. Virtually all the footage in Man on the Run is vintage, so there are no white haired rock stars in sight. But because McCartney is an executive producer and has provided a stunning amount of previously unseen private footage, there's lots of fresh stuff to see.

The danger of McCartney having such input, though, is of man on the run becoming too sanitized as a personal biographer. But it's not. The decade covered includes McCartney announcing the breakup of the Beatles, his very public musical feud with Lennon, the formation of McCartney's post Beatles band Wings, even the Paul is dead rumors. And in these new interviews, McCartney seems to be speaking honestly, not only about what happened, but how he felt about it all.

On the Beatles breakup, for example, it was McCartney who announced it publicly, but it was Lennon who already had left the group. He said it's kind of exciting. It's like telling someone you want a divorce. But uh I was thinking, what do I do now? Because it'd been my whole life really. You know, I'd had growing up, going to school and then becoming the Beatles.

It is a puzzle I had to kind of unravel. Paul's reaction at age 27 was to retreat with his wife, photographer Linda Eastman and family, to a remote property he owned in Scotland. In a vintage interview, she recalls his out of the blue suggestion. He said, I've got this for him. I know you won't like it. But it was so beautiful up. Way at the end of nowhere. Civilization dropped away. It was quite a relief.

Man on the Run does rely on other voices and perspectives to defend some of McCartney's infamous actions during this period. John Lennon's son, Sean, for example, excuses Paul's stunned, understated reaction to John's death, when asked by reporters, Paul called it a real drag, as having been in shock. And John himself, in an interview filmed years after the Beatles breakup, admits that Paul was right in hating and suing the manager that John had brought in to handle the group.

At the time, John and Paul even attacked one another in song. And in a new interview, Paul is very open about how much that's stung. But the back of my mind I was thinking, but all I ever knew. Sleep! How do I sleep at night? Well, actually, quite well. That same refreshing honesty extends to other chemo. The formation of his group wings and recruiting Linda as its first charter member. his jail time in Japan for bringing pot into that country,

Even the time Lauren Michaels on Saturday Night Live jokingly offered the Beatles a ridiculously small check if they would reunite on his show. Now here it is as you can see, a check made out to you, the Beatles. for three thousand dollars. All you have to do is sing three Beatle tunes. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a thousand dollars right there. Me and Linda were over to John's apartment at the Dakota.

He said, oh, this is a big show over here, Saturday Night Live. In my book, the Beatles are the best thing that ever happened to music. It goes even deeper than that. You're not just a musical group, you're a part of us. We grew up with you. We got kind of excited. We just go down, we show up. Hey! But it was like why? You know, I mean it'd be great for them. Would it be great for us? We've come full circle and now we're off on another journey.

So we just decided to just have another cup of tea and forget the whole idea. Man on the Run is more about the man than it is about his creative process. But his music runs all through the documentary, and it all adds up to an impressive, inspirational second act. Justin Chang reviews Dreams, starring Jessica Chastain. This is Fresh Air. This week on Sources and Methods, President Trump

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In the psychological drama Dreams, Jessica Chastain plays a San Francisco philanthropist whose foundation supports a dance academy in Mexico City. The movie, which also stars the Mexican actor and ballet dancer Isaac Hernandez, is the latest from the writer and director Michelle Franco, who previously worked with Chastain in the twenty twenty four film Memory.

Dreams opens in Select Theaters this week, and our film critic Justin Chang has this review. The first thing you see in the new movie Dreams, from the Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco, is a freight truck parked in the middle of nowhere. Inside the truck are several migrants, who are making the perilous journey from Mexico to the US. Franco is vague on specifics. He observes and implies, more than he explains.

One of the migrants is a young man named Fernando, played by Isaac Hernandez, and he quickly separates himself from the others and makes his way toward San Francisco. There's determination as well as exhaustion in Fernando's stride, almost as if he knows exactly where he's going. He does. Fernando heads to a swanky apartment, the home of a philanthropist named Jennifer McCarthy, played by Jessica Chastain.

Jennifer is surprised to see him, but they're clearly not strangers. They immediately fall into bed, in the first of the movie's many explicit sex scenes. The backstory comes together gradually. Fernando studied at a Mexico City Dance Academy that receives funding from Jennifer's Arts Foundation.

Their toward affair began some time ago, during one of Jennifer's many trips to Mexico. Now Fernando has entered the US illegally to be with her, and he's determined to stay, and perhaps even launch his dance career. Dreams first screened at the Berlin International Film Festival last February, less than a month into the second Trump presidency.

Although there are references to ICE and the looming threat that Fernando could be arrested and deported, immigration provides the context rather than the subject of the movie. What interests Franco the most is the ever shifting balance of power between Fernando, an undocumented immigrant trying to make ends meet as a bartender, and Jennifer, a privileged older white woman who travels by private jet.

It's a dynamic as complicated as it is toxic. Fernando needs Jennifer's support, but only up to a point. He's a talented enough dancer to make inroads with a prestigious San Francisco ballet company. Jennifer's desire for Fernando verges on an obsession, but one that she indulges only on her terms. Things were so much more convenient for her when she could see Fernando down in Mexico, away from the prying eyes and sharp judgments of her family members in college.

In this scene, the two are at a restaurant, where Fernando strikes up a conversation in Spence. With their waiter. So Fernando. Uh the tomate? I'm gonna start with a goat cheese salad. He's actually asking if he wants something to drink. Oh, sorry. Oh I'm fine. Didn't mean to interrupt your conversation. Está bien, naci. Ahorrita regreso enseguida. Permiso. Forget I'm here? Why? Well, you can speak English.

I think you should know a little Spanish by now, no? After all the time we spent in Mexico, having a Mexican boyfriend, Poquito, Señorita, Porfa. Chastain also starred in Franco's previous film, Memory, playing a sexual abuse survivor drawn into a relationship with a man with early onset dementia, played by Peter Sarzgo. The setup was tortured, but the actors were good enough to make you believe it. In a way, Dreams plays like a cruel B side to memory's more optimistic romance.

And Chastain, so sympathetic in the earlier film, here swaps virtue for outright villainy. She's long been one of our most fearless actors, and she gives herself over, chillingly, to the role of Jennifer, a monstrous manipulator and exploiter of someone she claims to love. Franco's films, including the class uprising thriller New Order, do not exactly overflow with the milk of human kindness.

He's often struck his critics, myself included, as something of a junior league Michael Hanica, hurling contempt at his characters, especially the rich ones, from a cold clinical distance. With dreams, an ironic title if ever there was one, he's an predictably cynical terrain. Here he targets the racism and hypocrisy of liberal do gooders like Jennifer, and his point as is inarguable as his methods are obvious.

This is the kind of movie where Jennifer's Smarmy brother, well played by Rupert Friend, will make crass comments about Mexicans, utterly oblivious to the Latina cleaner, quietly tidying up the office around him. I rolled my eyes at that scene, recoiling, not for the first time, from Franco's posture of smug superiority. But not all of dreams is so easy to shake off.

After a season of high minded movies about the redemptive power of art, there's something bracing about Franco's ruthlessly unsentimental view of the ecosystem in which artists and their benefactors operate. Not even Fernando's extraordinary talent is ultimately enough to make his dreams come true. Isaac Hernandez is a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater, and the film's most pleasurable scenes are those in which we see Fernando dancing.

Fleeting Moments of Beauty in a film with a relentlessly ugly vision of the world. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed the new film Dream. On Monday's show, Jessie Buckley, the star of Hamnet, for which she's nominated for an Oscar and has already won a Golden Globe. She launched her career on a British TV singing competition with judges Andrew Lloyd Weber and director Cameron McIntosh. We'll hear what that sounds like. Hope you can see.

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