By Michelle Devereaux
True, Frank Oz has made his living for the last twenty years as a director of glossy, big-budget Hollywood comedies: from the mega-hits (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, What About Bob?, In & Out) to the occasional colossal flop (The Stepford Wives). And for the discerning nerd, Yoda always he will be. But for me, it’s hard not to meet the man and think of him as anything but a pig. Oz not only provided the voices of Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, and the Swedish Chef, among other classic Muppet characters, he’s also a master puppeteer in his own right.
So how to “keep the Muppet questions to a minimum” as instructed by the publicist on the occasion of his new movie, Death at a Funeral? (Especially when Oz himself makes an off-the-cuff remark about going “whole hog”? Well, it helps that Funeral is actually pretty amusing. An ensemble farce about a repressed English clan attending the funeral of a patriarch with a scandalous secret, the film features British vets like Rupert Graves, Robert Vaughan, and Ewen Bremner, plus American actors Peter Dinklage and Alan Tudyk (a standout). I sat down with Oz to discuss the movie, his desire to become a master of the “dark” arts, and other things (sigh) no
Muppet.
