Chris Fleming looks wistfully at the wave of YouTube creators being courted by Hollywood next Back rooms Director Ken Parsons and mania’Cary Parker has hit the runaway horror pictures at multiplexes.
“I missed it. Yes, I missed it,” American comedian and actor who first rose to fame with his silly YouTube series Gayle, Where he played the titular house mother, Gayle Waters Hollywood Reporter At the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal.
“The industry didn’t care,” Fleming recalls, “but the people did,” which allowed it to happen Gayle It ran for just over three years until 2015. But it was a long road from a YouTube series that flew under Hollywood’s radar to its first HBO special, Chris Fleming: Living in the Palacewhich debuted in February.
“I’ve had a really strong career over the last 10 years or so, being able to work in theaters for my fan base. The HBO special and the success it had blew things up to the max,” Fleming explained. “For starters, he’s in demand for movie and TV shows.”
“Before the special, I was struggling to do one skit a year. Now, since the special, there’s been a lot,” Fleming says. Besides his frenetic, prancing stage presence and eccentric storytelling, Fleming’s HBO special was memorable for his purple suit designed by Anthony Sartino, who famously designed wardrobes for the late rock star Prince.
As for whether comedy specials continue to move the needle with audiences as major platforms increasingly focus on live events and sports, Fleming credits the arms race between Hulu, Amazon, Max, YouTube TV and Netflix with stand-up specials that has boosted his career.
He accepts that an increasingly fragmented media space means that no project or performance can carry the lasting firepower of a career like it could before the eras of streaming and the internet overtook the world of stand-up comedy. “But my life before February was different than it has been since February [the comedy special] “He came out,” Fleming adds.
For one thing, he’s got two movie acting roles on the go that he can’t talk about yet, one of which landed him in Montreal a week after a haircut that cut off his long, wavy locks. “I had to cut my hair to play a regular husband, a religious man, a new father. So they wanted me to be unrecognizable, not to look like Chris Fleming at all. That’s why they made me dirty in that way,” Fleming explains, without the distinctive wolf cut.
The Just for Laughs Comedy Festival wraps up this weekend.
