Interview josh gad biography

I figure I have two choices: I can either break the ice, make a joke or I can projectile vomit all over you and your colleagues. So forgive me if I chose the former. You know, you can question anything you want about me, but I will not let you question my work ethic. I have done nothing but devote myself to my craft for four years. But I love what I do, and I take it very seriously.

It is easy to think you can accurately assess how your audition is being received by casting professionals. Want to get your acting career started? So we have to figure out how are we going to revisit these characters who are lost or not lost, and he needs to be a more creative writer throughout with his powers. It's kind of funny, because you're writing about a writer, and you've got to be more creative to make him more creative.

Another character I really like that you included in this was his daughter, Izzy. Izzy is black and Jewish, and I really thought it was a powerful moment in the first issue, when Stan's called to her school after she gets into a fight and his ex, Izzy's mother's Bets, talks about being black and Jewish, being a minority in a minority. That was a very powerful moment.

Do you guys want to talk a little bit about creating his daughter and what she brought to the story? Benjamin Berkowitz: You know, the name was in honor of Josh's daughter. But with this story, we also wanted to kind of take this opportunity to tell readers there's a sort of spectrum of Judaism.

Interview josh gad biography

That Jews aren't just Ashkenazi, smoked salmon, bagel-eating Jews. There's a vast diversity to Judaism. And so we really wanted to explore that. And so we really wanted to open readers up and to see this in our story, and to want to explore and learn more. You guys have talked about the mythology. The Ring of Solomon, golems playing a big role in the story.

But it's not just mythology. You guys also really build a world on Jewish history. Throughout the comic, you see Solomon's role in history, seeing these big, pivotal moments in Jewish history. Do you guys want to talk about emphasizing history as well as mythology when it came to creating your story? Josh Gad: I think that we're currently at an inflection point right now where, unfortunately, there's a far greater number of people who either don't know the Holocaust existed or don't want to believe the Holocaust existed, which sets a very dangerous precedent when you know you are immersed in a world that is clearly becoming the disinformation age.

You forget the lessons that history teaches you in order to warn you about that which can become very real again if you're not careful. This felt super personal to me, because I'm the grandchild of not one, but two Holocaust survivors. From the age of six, my grandparents would tell me the stories in order to remind me to never forget, in order to empower me to continue the tradition of warning people about the dangers of bigotry, the dangers of scapegoating, the dangers of not only antisemitism, but hatred in general, and the real world effects of what can happen when you allow those things to permeate a society and a culture.

These people were murdered in cold blood. And you know, these are people who could have been my aunts and my great aunts and uncles, who could have had, you know, children and grandchildren that would have been my cousins, and I will never get to meet them, because they never got a chance to exist. And so all of this, you know, hopefully goes beyond entertainment and becomes, and I use this word carefully, edutainment, because I do think that we want people to not only engage with this in a thrilling and fun way, but also to leave it understanding maybe a little bit more than when they went into it.

That's a very powerful answer, Josh, thank you for that. That leads into my next question. Ben, if you and Max would like to talk about this as well, your story doesn't shy away from very real and scary things, particularly modern-day Nazism, which we've unfortunately seen a big rise of in America, and your story doesn't do it so much as "Here's our bad guy who is an ethno-fascist", but more in the sense that this is a very powerful idea that never really left our world.

How have the last few years shaped what you wanted to do with your story? Benjamin Berkowitz: Max and I have talked about this a lot, and we all have, as Jews, it's always kind of in the back of every day, every moment of what you're thinking of, you know, everyday antisemitism, the Holocaust, trauma. We really wanted to incorporate these real moments that are happening now and in the past, so that people can experience them and want to learn more and do a deeper dive beyond our comic.

And with our character, King Solomon, who has become immortal, and he's witnessing these, these unbearable tragedies throughout history, you know, he's almost helplessness, because he can't impact change. But then you have this villain character of Helena, who experienced her own trauma and wants to use her power to change the world, to kind of rewrite it, and to kind of erase everything that happened.

But you can't erase the pain that we've all experienced, because it's something that we live in. We need to remember, and we need to make sure that it never happens again. And so we really wanted to kind of imbue that into our story, and also force people to want to learn beyond. Max Berkowitz: I feel like I was dealing with this every day for the past year.

I mean, in my own life, you had people, even DMing, even your own friends, saying certain things, and you're like "What did you just say? So you want to teach people about these moments of past history and what's happening now and what's correct and not correct. But also, we want to entertain people too. Benjamin Berkowitz: I mean, you see how they incorporated Nazis into Indiana Jones and how it's still relevant today in our story and other stories.

I mean Mike Mignola has been incorporating Nazis into Hellboy. Even as a kid doing shows at school or in high school or in college or on Broadway, he had never seen me onstage," the Frozen star explained to host Rebecca Shaw. After the show, Gad's father came to his home and the pair shared what was at first "a very awkward sort of conversation.

And it was amazing to have that opportunity to just sit with him, and we just talked and a lot of what we discussed ended up in the book. But even if Gad had won the role, he may not have even have been allowed to take part in the film. As he explains, at a cast party for Putnam star Celia Keenan-Bolger, the show's director James Lapine "pulled up a seat next to me and told me that he heard I was going to miss a show to audition for the movie.

I thanked him for letting me out for a day. He responded that he had told the producers not to let me out, but that they had done so anyway. Gad continues, "Attempting to once again assuage his ego, I said, 'Well, just to be clear, I intend to finish out my run either way,' to which he responded, 'What makes you think we would even want you back?