Joss Whedon

Haven’t been to this board in a while, but when I saw that our interview with Joss from Wizard World was a topic of discussion, I wanted to pop in and say thanks to everyone that enjoyed it!

Also, this is the only place where I can finally speak candidly about the crazy circumstances that made that short but hilarious interview with Joss happen. Admittedly, the "joke" makes more sense if you see it in the context of the whole episode :

Play this famous video

Anyway, our Podcast show is about all things Geeky, and when were deciding what to do for the Wizard World episode, we came up with the joke that I’d be interviewing Joss Whdeon, all of us knowing full well that Joss wouldn’t be there. So myself and our director Sean wrote a bunch of Joss specific questions (he wrote the "Etruscan text" one, I can’t take credit for that) and we basically ambushed poor unsuspecting Con people with said Joss questions, hoping their answers would be funny enough to make the gag work. After about an hour of filming different interviews (and sort of ticking off some people that thought they would be plugging their comic books on an internet show, only to be asked how their writing was going on the Wonder Woman script) we were wrapping up with our last fake interview, and I’m just about to ask the poor unsuspecting guy that writes "Dracula vs. King Arthur" a Joss question, when our Producer Bill runs over and tells us we have to stop the interview because we’re out of battery on the camera. The camera guy looks at the camera, fully charged, then back to Bill like he’s crazy and I try to keep going with the interview. Bill steps in again and says "We have to go NOW!" I apologize to the guy I was interviewing and we all go to ask Bill what the hell he thinks he’s doing. He just points ahead of us and there he is, at the ass-end of Artist’s Alley, Joss Whedon himself. Turns out about a minute earlier my co-host Sarah had spotted him, freaked out, ran over and literally jumped on Producer Bill’s back yelling "He’s here! He’s actually here!!" So there’s Joss, we have a camera, I have a microphone, what do we do? I say "Start filming, I’ll think of something, just start filming" (the beginning of the clip that we trimmed from the interview sort of looks like a scene from "The Blair Witch Project" as we were tripping over ourselves to get to him and couldn’t believe he was just right there, and alone) So, as I got close I just decided to say he was dressed as Joss Whedon, it sort of went along with the joke we had set up, and I knew if I tried to corner him with typical nerd questions he’d probably bolt. Joss was.. Joss. He was hilarious and brilliant and the whole time I’m playing the sarcastic jerk guy and inside my head is screaming "THAT IS JOSS FREAKING WHEDON! KISS HIS SHOES, WORM!! KISS THEM!!!" Anyway, Joss does his thing, I try to act cool(and fail) I ask the super-nerdy question, he bails out, then when a fan finally catches him (yes, that was really a fan. I know, it all fell together so perfectly even I thought it was staged, and I was there!) Joss grabs US and and pulls us over to film him again! The final part you don’t see in the interview, which they keep threatening to put up on our website just to blackmail me, is the 4 seconds after Joss walks away, I say "Nice one, dude" to him, and then turn back to the camera.. and completely freak out. I sort of have this little whimpery voice and I say something like "That....was....so...amazing". To add lame to lameness, once we called "cut" the producer, director, and myself all hugged each other. Three goofy nerd guys all holding one another at the Wizard World convention. Sarah rolled her eyes and said something like "I hope Joss didn’t see that." The final punchline is that actually filming Joss Whedon kind of killed our original joke, so we had to change it up a little (adding the bit where I supposedly don’t know what Joss actually looks like) and then had to shoot for another hour and a half to fix the gag. And Joss wasn’t even supposed to be at that Con, he evidently was there regarding the charity comic book project he’s doing for DC, but was not a featured guest. We never spotted him again after our interview.

So that’s it, sorry that was so long, I assume no one read this far. I just knew this was pretty much the only place I could tell that rambling tale. So thanks again for watching it, now I have to get back to work on our next episode and figure out how in the hell we could ever top that.

 Jack http://www.geek-week.net