A Conversation with Alan Rickman (Part 2)

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s interview with Alan Rickman concludes with a discussion of “the mysterious mechanism of acting and theatre and storytelling” and the use of special effects in the Harry Potter movies.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. And I also serve as Director of the Hayden Planetarium. Come check us out sometime. I got with me in studio, the one, the only, the inimitable Chuck Nice. Yes. Welcome back, man. Hey Neil. Love having you. I love being here, man. And you're into all kinds of stuff. First you're tweeting at ChuckNiceComic. At ChuckNiceComic. Other Chuck Nices were taken, I'm told. Yeah, screw the rest of those Chuck Nices. You were just slow.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the comic on there. Also, I was checking your bio in progress. You're doing a show where you're just invading people's homes. Which sounds creepy. Yes.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Imagine that. A black man home invasion show.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's called Home Strange Home, man. Home Strange Home. Me going around to some of the weirdest and most unique homes in America. And calling them out. And calling them out, yeah. And what network? HGTV. Home and Garden Television. Home and Garden. That is my sister's favorite network. I love her. Every speed dial button goes to that network. Knock out a woman. So, I'm not gonna tell her. She's gonna find you by accident. Fantastic. And she's there. I got with me also my friend and colleague Charles Liu.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Great to see you.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Professor Liu. Excellent.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Astrophysicist at the City University of New York on Staten Island.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've got you here because we're featuring my interview clips with Alan Rickman. Yes! Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman. By Grand Star's hammer, you shall be avenged. No, I didn't. Galaxy place. I didn't know this in advance. That was it? Both is good or bad.

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll find out. Good reference, bad impersonation.

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Alan Rickman, you may know him from his role in Harry Potter. He was neat, creepy, defined the word creepy. He's it. In Harry Potter, of course, he was in Die Hard, one of the greatest villain roles ever. Yes. He was in Galaxy Quest, as it can't be a movie as there ever was, in Dogma, many other films. And he was also in Bottle Shot. Bottle Shot. Bottle Shot, yeah, yeah, wine film, a big fan of that. And, you know, for folks who are sort of A-list guests like that, I always like knowing what role science might have played in their lives. It's not always good. So I just like knowing, just so I know what I'm dealing with, you know, in the interviews. Let's find out what Alan Rickman tells us about his life experience learning science.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Alan, I have to ask, because you've been in some intriguing science fiction films like Galaxy Quest. I always wonder, do people who end up in those roles, do they have some science background that leads them to it? How is science flavored in your life, in your years in school?

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Put it this way, when I did my very last physics exam, I got 4%.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  That would be four marks out of 100.

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not 96 because you lost 4.4.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  I got 4 marks.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your physics?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  And I think they used to give you one mark for getting your name right. On the top of the paper. And the teacher wrote a hysterical paper and he didn't mean that it was funny.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the corresponding year in school in America that that would be? Is that?

• 3:45Speaker 02

  That would be when I was about 15 or 16, something like that. Yeah, and it's before you choose which subjects you're gonna do what we call A level when you're 17 and 18 and then you go to university. So physics was, or science was never, ever gonna be part of my life.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that when you said, "Maybe I should be an actor"?

• 4:07Speaker 02

  At least I had an option.

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Makes me wonder, like, had you done well in physics, we would have never had you as an actor. I don't know what these four, how these forces operate, but.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  No, actually, there was somebody in my year who, because it was, it was, it was a good school in that sense. They didn't kind of try to trap you or type you, and somebody in my year did.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is a very UK thing to do, right?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I know about UK, it's world over, you know, get a label on people as quickly as they can. This guy in my year did for his three A-level subjects, i.e. leading up to university, did physics, maths and art. And he wound up being an art teacher.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  And I'm sure all the better for having had science in his life.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so, yeah, we got four percent on this physics. I'm not gonna ask you what percent you got on your physics. Chuck, I'm turning to you on this one.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  I, uh, that's funny he says that because I remember, now, we had physics in the ninth grade.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  The school that I went to.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, was it private school or public?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  It was, it was a prep school.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Prep school, okay.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  And it was academically advanced.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  I was not academically advanced.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  And so I failed physics and.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, now, now it comes out.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  But what it.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's when he said, I think I'll be a comedian.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  There.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And hope fun on a physics radio show, yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  But I, I loved science and I really felt like, man, I can't believe I'm, I, I failed this class and I blamed the teacher. But I had. That is the right thing to do.

• 5:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, Chuck.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  I have so in favor.

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I blamed the teacher. So you're, you're an educator.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, as am I, of course, but you, you're, you think a lot about this. So I, I'm intrigued that he could fail a class.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But still embrace the meaning of science, because when Alan Rickman said he got four percent, he wasn't bad-mouthing science.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 5:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He just got four percent.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all he was saying.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  One thing that he said that was so telling, he said that most places in the world, you get trapped into places. Oh, you must be the science guy. Oh, you must be the art guy.

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  But the bottom line is, especially in this modern world, you can love anything and be anything at the same time. The information.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without the metrics of an exam to tell you whether you should do either.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  The information that used to have to be forced into you as.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  For something is no longer that constrained in the classroom. You can get it anywhere, like all over the world, online.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so we live in a time where the teacher is not the sole source of your enlightenment.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  So the teacher's role becomes whether or not you learn how to think about things in a positive light, whether you understand things in a way that makes sense for you in your life. If the teacher fails to do that, it is the teacher's fault. It is not the student's fault. So I tell all my students, I might teach astronomy, you know, I say, look, if you don't like math and science by the end of this class, don't blame math and science, blame me. Right. And I'm totally comfortable with that. I'm really glad to hear it.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  What did it for me, though, was.

• 7:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you were burning effigy recently.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  That's fine.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you do well in any science class?

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I did well in most of them. I just really, I don't know what it was, I don't think we had a communication thing. But then another, my chemistry teacher gave me a book called Introduction to Astronomy.

• 7:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah, your chemistry teacher.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  My chemistry teacher gave me this.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Good for your chemistry.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Because the chemistry, the chemistry's teacher said, there's no way you can be doing this well in chemistry and failing physics. And when I started, this book was really fascinating.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the teacher figures something else must be operating on that, yeah?

• 7:36Speaker 03

  And I found the book so fascinating that it inspired me to continue going.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's great, and you became a comedian.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  But astronomy is often a gateway, science.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, we've got more of my interview with Alan Rickman, the actor extraordinaire. And I've got in studio Chuck Nice, Charles Lud, we'll be back in a minute.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Radio. By the way, you can find us three ways. First, just simply on the web, it's stargtlorradio.net. We have an archive of all of our old shows, check it out. But there you can also download us as a podcast, as you can on iTunes. We're also in video form on the Nerdist Network of YouTube, so find us there. And not only that, we're on broadcast radio. And so Chuck, with a lot of roots in broadcast radio, it's so great to have you participate in this adventure. Yes, yeah, I feel the same way. And my roots are deep in broadcast radio. Yeah, yeah, so thanks for that. And Chuck, you were a radio broadcaster in college. Yes, I was. Excellent, so let's put on our radio voices. There we go, alright.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I did punk rock once in a while, so it was like, "Oh, how you doing?" It's a little hospital. Punk rock. So in this edition of StarTalk, we've got my interview clips with Alan Rickman, who's actor extraordinaire. I mean, when he speaks, you can only just be silent and listen to the words as they come out of his mouth. At first, he's got the British accent, which means he has access to vocabulary that Americans can only dream of. And just the roles he's played have been so compelling and so absorbing. And in this next clip, it came off of our discussion of his exposure to science and what about science might intrigue him. He didn't do well on that physics class, he got 4% out of 100. I thought it was 4% off, 4% in. So yes, that's bad, that'd be an F minus.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Minus, minus, minus. So, but does that influence what roles you might play? Is it good or is it bad? Is he still curious? Turns out, he's quite interested in human physiology. Who isn't? But to know that an actor is brings an extra dimension to it. Let's find out what he tells us about that.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  About watching somebody play the piano, I don't know how that's physically possible. How do they, how do people retain that information? How do they then not look at what their hands are doing? And how is that message going from the brain to 10 fingers and dividing that information up? And also, um, operations now where the edges get blurred whereby people can operate with a tiny camera inside people's bodies. And apparently, the way they train themselves to do that is by getting really good at computer games.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, that's a fascinating frontier. So I'm curious then, I mean, you're intelligent, you're a deep thinker, we've spoken earlier, you even think philosophically about the world. It seems to me that that could and would play some role in what drives the roles you select in your acting career. I mean, why wouldn't they? If someone had an idea, they say, "We're gonna cast doctors." Consider, was it in the 1960s, that movie, that Ozymor Asimov story, Fantastic Voyage, where the vessel, the Proteus, I think it was called, shrunk, there's some important diplomat that has a brain tumor, and he might die, but they found a laser that could fix it, but they have to shrink down the laser and get inside and do it.

• 11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they take this vessel, put people in it, shrink it down to the size of, it can fit in a syringe, and then you go inside the body. And then, the whole movie is what is inside the body and what they see, and the red blood cells, and the ventricles of the heart, and the veins, and the arteries, and they get to the brain, and they pull out their laser, which was a big thing back in the 60s, and I'm just curious, those sound like intriguing roles, and if you feel that.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  It just means I have to do a lot of background work to catch up.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  That's all right, no, that's enjoyable too. I like ambiguity in roles, because that's interesting, because it means there's no rules, and it means you can pull people into a private storytelling space, and they're not being manipulated by outside forces. Their imaginations are allowed to work along with mine, but at the same time, I did actually do a film playing a heart surgeon, and I was on really big catch-up there, because I was now forced to try to understand how the heart even works, and then to mime doing a heart operation, because it was about Alfred Blaylock, who did the first Blue Baby operation.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 12:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so when you're an actor, you don't know what you're gonna be called to do. And there he is. First, he's intrigued by the moto-neurokineticism of a piano player. Who is it? Did you play the piano, Troy?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  I do play the piano.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course you do.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you play the piano too?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Uh, no longer.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No longer?

• 12:59Speaker 03

  I did, I took lessons for a little while, but I sucked.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  No, my daughter's way better than I am.

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  But the reality is that indeed, when the human body programmed itself, the reason we practice is that we're able to train our bodies to do things beyond our ability to think consciously. It's the same for playing piano, as it is for, say, a football player. If somebody's coming in and trying to sack you as a quarterback...

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you run the other way? What kind of training does that take?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  But you literally don't have enough time to think to move. Your body has to know to move before you even think, "Oh, somebody's gonna come hit me." So, you're training yourself all those years. You think, "Oh, I can play quarterback," or "Oh, I can sack the quarterback." The reality is, your body has to react faster than you can think and command your body to react in order to be successful.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's, so you're training?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you train, so, so, yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  I feel the same way at the Source Awards.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  It's like, if you hear "pop, pop," you don't even think, you just "whoa."

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you, you've done this, this has happened so often.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your moto-neurokinetic response.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  You would think that it would occur to me just not to go to the Source Awards.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Hundreds of hours, thousands of hours of that kind of practice. But what is very cool is that the human brain, even with a few hours, can make it so that other humans looking at that person suspect that there's the appearance of ability, even though the true ability is not yet revealed.

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so the actor doesn't have to then be the 20,000-hour expert?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Precisely.

• 14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They can just...

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Even twenty hour expert, right? And again, that takes

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they have to know how to mimic.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that itself has its own brain, not neuro cognitive things. So different people are good at different things. It could be, for example, that the maestro piano player particularly can arrange his or her fingers to become very good at playing the piano. Whereas the actor or the comedian has the moto neuro ability to find a way to reach those specific aspects that appear to be excellent to others and be able to communicate.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, when I was hosting Nova Science Now on PBS, we did a segment on your brain learning while you're asleep of something you had done the day before.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you do a task that you've never done before and you, it's hard at first and you get a little better at it and you keep getting better, but there's a point where you're just not getting better. You, you, you fatigue, I guess, is how you, we would normally describe it. You go to sleep, wake up the next morning, kick in, you start at a higher level than you left off the day before.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Because your brain has added the information into its system.

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just knowledge, it was adding kinetic of memory of what you were doing. And so when they say sleep on it, that it actually has meaning.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 15:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and I was able to confirm that. I did this with multiple, I did it with a video game that required kineticism. I did it with a, a typing sequence, I did it with a, a memory sequence. The next day I was better and so, um, the brain is working.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  So is your brain like making new neural pathways so that you're better at that?

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what they used to say, Joe. But you're, you're, it's just, I mean, we're not growing new neurons, right?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Okay. It's just the rearrangement of the chemical pieces that we picked up. It all kind of settles in during that time when you're not doing anything else.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So all just sacks of chemistry is what you're telling us.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Oh, chemistry, alchemy, magic.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Magic.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  But as well you know, Neil, all scientists throughout history who have reached intractable things have at first ascribed them to perhaps magic or divinity, but knowing that that's just a gap until we fill it with more knowledge of it.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's interesting is it works that way historically and there's the famous edict or adage from Arthur C. Clarke where any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and so, so.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Take an iPhone back to colonial America.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, take it back 10 years ago. You'd still be burned at the stake. Right, right. So for an actor to learn to be another whole person, I'm intrigued and heartened, well of course because we see it and it's real, actors who are good pick it up, they capture the essence of it to the point where you, the viewer, even if you're an expert in what they're acting, you think that they are what that is. You want them to be that.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  On the other hand.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I watched The Big Bang Theory and I'm certain those actors are experts in all the fields that they talk about.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  On the other hand, doesn't it rankle you when, I don't know, maybe Chuck, you know this, when you're watching somebody pretending to play the piano on the movie and their hands are over here and you know that the sound is coming from there, you're going, oh, forget it, man, I'm switching the channel.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not taking you to the next.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Or the next taping of Big Bang Theory.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and some actors will actually want to learn the piano so that, you know, like they want to be that real, or they'll gain the weight or lose the weight.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  No, you're right, Denzel Washington played a trumpet player in Mo Berta Blues and literally learned the fingering, not to play the trumpet, but the finger.

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you checked the cheek to see if it was. More of our interview with Alan Rickman when we come back to Start On.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. Today, we are featuring my interview with Alan Rickman. I've listened to that guy all day. No, that is not a good imitation.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  I don't know, he sounds a little smug when he talks.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but then you want that, you know?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Irene.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  But his last line in the last movie, "You have your mother's eye, such pathos." You just want to shed a tear for the dude. Yeah, I wanted to shed a tear for that impression.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  That's why you're the comedian and I'm the astronomy professor. No, I'm glad you did it, because mine sucked, but that one...

• 19:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, he's in a lot of movies. The movie I'm thinking of right this minute is, he was one of the lead characters in the movie Bottleshock, which chronicles an episode in the history of American ornology.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Ah!

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's one of those OE words.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ornology, yes.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Well, Neil, I hope it's okay that I reveal to the world how much of an enophile you are. This man, folks, is one of the, maybe two or three most knowledgeable people about wine in the whole world.

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that he knows. In the whole world, but I know.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  You have to let me finish my sentence.

• 19:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, fine. Well, thank you for those gudos, but I'm just saying, so I had to go see that movie, and I find out neither of you saw that movie, so I had to do all the talking this segment.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Didn't see Sideways either.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so Sideways is another good one. So, I'm just impressed that there are these, that there's a wine movie out there, and it chronicles this chapter in the history of American winemaking, where California is trying to make a name for itself. Right? It's got the grapes of the classic wine-growing regions of France, from Bordeaux, and especially Bordeaux in this particular case. And so they grow their Cabernet Sauvignon grape. And so the most expensive wines ever at auction from France are this great. You put the plantings here in America and they're trying to compete. And there was a contest in nineteen seventy six, our bicentennial year. It was all up with America. And the French said, let's have a contest. You guys are so uppity.

• 20:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's bring some of your wines against some of our wines. And some people were a little skeptical that maybe the French were trying to embarrass us on our. Because, by the way, the only way you can conduct that experiment is if you taste the wine blind. Right. Right? You can't know in advance because then you don't trust the judges. Especially the French.

• 21:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why don't we have a contest where you bring your still?

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so you gotta work that and play it right. And so Alan Rickman plays, was he one of the judges? I forgot the exact role, but he was there as part of this this contest that would be conducted. And so let's check out this clip and we'll talk more about wine when we get back.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so you study your roles as as any good actor does, which tells me then in Bottle Shock, you had to do a lot of wine tasting.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  That's not so difficult.

• 21:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Had to do your homework for Bottle Shock.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Uh, no, well, the real problem with that was we were shooting it all in Sonoma. And so when we came to the scene where there's a, it's about a blind wine testing between French, a true story between French and American wines.

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you taste the wine and you don't, you're not told in advance anything about it.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this was set up in Paris thirty odd years ago by the character I was playing to publicize his wine academy. And this all happened and his judges were very eminent French, all French chefs and wine experts.

• 22:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And snobs, basically.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  They knew what they were talking about. Horror of Horrors, the American wines won.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an extraordinary story.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  But the departure from anything to do with the reality is when we shot that scene of the actual wine tasting, it was in about ninety degrees of heat outdoors in Sonoma, where of course you couldn't possibly have done that because it would have ruined all the wine.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right, right, right. But it was visually stunning. Right, yeah, look.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It looked good. Yeah, so, so there he was. So, uh, he was the, sort of, the British merchant who organized this tasting in France. And, yeah, America won. And in fact, I have tasted the wine that won that contest. It was 1973 Stag's Leap. Stag's Leap? Cask 23. Wow! There's Cask 23. Was it actually that good? Stag's Leap, uh, in 1973. Now, now, back then, and still, uh, California wines tend to mature sooner than, than French wines. So, when the French lost this contest, they would then say, "Oh, well, the American..." Because it's 1976 was the contest, these American wines. The other French wines were in the early 70s, right?

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they would say, "Oh, ours has not shown well yet." Come back in three years. We will see who wins then. Big.

• 23:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But by then, it was too late. Genie was out of the bottle. Wow. Time Magazine was present at the tasting, and they ended up writing about it. No other American press was interested in covering it. You know, there is a California wine called Rocket Science. Yes. In fact, I had some of that yesterday. As good as Stag's Leap? They're coming along.

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But actually, I'm a sucker for a wine label that has cosmic themes. And there's a lot of them. In fact, I think cosmically themed wine labels are like second behind, like, nature stuff, like flowers and cute animals. Just check it out. There's some with moons and planets and stars. All night. Yeah. It's the Lucky Charms of Wine!

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Yellow Brick Road, that's the next one. Yeah, so, uh, I'm quite sure that cosmic themes have infused the wine-making. People might have done well in their Astro 101, and it showed up on their labels. When we come back, more of my interview with Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that was more...

• 24:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back with StarTalk Radio, featuring my interviews with Alan Rickman. Alan, and both of you guys cannot imitate the man, I'm sorry.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Okay, you're right.

• 25:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My co-host.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Doesn't stop us from trying.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doesn't stop you from trying. And we just came off of that segment with Bottle Shock. Where an American wine won this prestigious French competition, set up to showcase how far California had come. And, you know, the science of wine is fascinating. In University of California Davis, there's an entire school there that specializes in the science of wine. And so, what I like is that the Americans were saying, "Whatever you guys do in France, because you want to raise it to an art." In California, they're saying, "We're gonna bring it down to a science."

• 25:41Speaker 03

  We will kick your ass with science!

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll blind them with science.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Blind! Drop some science on them, sir!

• 25:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Alan Rickman didn't only do Bottle Shock, he also did one of the campiest, funniest movies ever, Galaxy Quest. Doctor Lazarus. Now, I don't know how many people out there saw the film, because I don't think it was like a number one in the charts, but definitely, it's certainly like a rentable film. And it was about a TV characters from a science fiction show, that actual aliens came, who'd have to protect their civilization or something, want them to help them. Because they thought it was real, because they got the television signals that went out into space!

• 26:26Speaker 03

  We have seen your historical...

• 26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was every Trekkie's fantasy come true. Yeah, as a Star Trek fan. Every Star Trek fan. Because you want it to be real, and the aliens thought it was real. So Alan Rickman played Dr. Lazarus, right? In the Galaxy Quest TV show.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  If I grab Thar's hammer, you shall be a Venn.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go straight to that clip.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just asked him, "How does this fit into your acting repertoire?" Let's find out what he said.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, of course, in Galaxy Quest, I'm trying to think if I've done any others, but that was very particularly about a bunch of actors.

• 27:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's what's good.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Who were all trapped in a really bad TV show.

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  So that's really all I had to know.

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were portraying an actor on that.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That just didn't occur to me to think that that was...

• 27:27Speaker 02

  And possibly a bad actor.

• 27:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Who had, you know, aims of having been in Shakespeare and found himself in a sci-fi show, which then finished 12 years ago, and now these actors just go to conventions.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, because, so, and the real aliens showed up, right?

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Real aliens showed up unnoticed in the crowd of people wearing my costume.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The premise, it's just so crazy.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  It was brilliant.

• 27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, it's a fun, crazy premise, and I'm glad you did it, because it was, it was there.

• 28:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this is in his portfolio of acting roles. You know, I just remember, I know, I had to, forgive me, I had to reference my notes. The aliens in the movie called the Thermians and octopoidal creatures, right?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and humanoid form.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  But they had humanoid form when they were interacting with us.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  But when you saw them in their true form...

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Oh, they were...

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Disgusting.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they did it for our benefit, so that we wouldn't completely...

• 28:33Speaker 01

  No, they're awesome.

• 28:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely freak out.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Alan made an interesting point, that there are actors there who may have trained in Shakespeare and find themselves on a hit TV show that has nothing to do with Shakespeare.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Rickman played that part to perfection, in a sense, because...

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He looked a little grumpy in that role, right?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yes, he was supposedly Sir Alexander Dane, a distinguished Shakespearean, who winds up on TV and now looks like a moron. In one scene in the movie, he had to go stand in front of a Walmart-like box store with his friends and say, "Buy Grabthah's hammer, what a savings."

• 29:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the store.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so the whole point of it is that you can take a role and play with it as much as you want, or you can disdain it and say, "That's not part of you," right? In modern Star Trek lore, people are still going around doing exactly the same thing.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In my one cameo on The Big Bang Theory, I chatted with the Raj character, right? Because he's the astrophysicist on the show. And I said, "Oh, so what is your background?" Like, he's classically trained in England, and he's studied Shakespeare. And then I thought to myself, "Did he ever imagine that he would be best known for like a geeky science kid in a TV sitcom?" And so, I guess, surely it all folds in, but maybe you've got to go where the... You've got to roll with it.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, you do, and you hate every minute of it. Until you get a check. Funny how that just makes everything okay. Oh, I'm just really selling my soul here. This is awful. There is no artistic integrity to any of this. How much of a check? My God! I'm stealing money!

• 30:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More of my interview with Alan Rickman when we come back to StarTalk.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back at StarTalk Radio, featuring my interviews with Alan Rickman.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman.

• 30:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it's just awful. That's why he's Alan Rickman and we're not. So I got Chuck Nice here. Chuck, you're tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're tweeting too?

• 31:05Speaker 03

  I am, I am, at Chuck Lou. C-H-U-C-K-L-I-U.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Lou, to education things and on cosmic things.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  Pretty much.

• 31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool, we'll have to find you there. And we talked about some of the roles Alan Rickman has played. And so in his role in The Bottle Shock, he had to know something about wine, so he had to do some wine homework about that. In fact, that film featured chemical changes in wine. Because as they portrayed it, although I don't think it actually happened this way in real life, but it added to the drama. The wine, when it was shipped overseas, went through a chemical change for having been sort of jostled. Because you have to move the wine to where the tasters are. And wine doesn't like being moved any more than you like being moved, bottled up. And so, so the wine has to recover from this. And so there's a little bit of chemistry in the film as well. And if you don't know the chemistry, or you have no feeling for it, or you can't embrace it,

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and you're an actor trying to say convincing chemistry words, it doesn't play. And Alan Rickman seems to have pulled this off each time. We talked about what is to learn science and what might prevent you from learning science.

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I've got a question. You scored so poorly on your physics exam. I don't know if that scarred you. Often in America, when people say they get scarred, it's not from an exam score, it's from a really bad teacher. But in either case, they're turned off from science for life. You've had several occasions for science to work its way back in your life. Not only in some film roles, but in your role as a heart surgeon. And there's a little bit of chemistry in Bottle Shock. You're thinking about what goes on inside the wine. So I'm curious, did those forces help you regain an appreciation for science? Or the role of science just intellectually, or even in society?

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah. And you're right. I wish, I don't want to criticize the teachers I had, but...

• 32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go for it.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  But clearly, there are other ways to teach it. And maybe you have to figure out what kind of child you have to find out how to get this information inside their heads or bodies.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The key for individualized teaching, I think, was that comes down to.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and maybe, you know, I've stood on a platform and I've been zapped by computers from every direction so that they can reform me in a computer. You were talking about earlier about, you know, we won't need to act anymore. But they did get enough information from me to then put me into the background of a shot without me having to show up.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  So that can be done. So why can't you take a child?

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Put it in a machine and zap it from every angle and figure out which would be the best way to teach it about a subject that it finds difficult.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the modern actor's version of what we all said in the seventies and eighties. If we could put a man on the moon, we could, you know, fill in the rest of the sentence.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  You know, why is this person dyslexic? What's going on?

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we can digitize an actor and put him in a scene, why can't we train people to understand the world?

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it. I like that.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Because I find it fascinating. There's just something in my brain that refuses to accept the information, doesn't know what to do with it. It just goes as soon as you start talking.

• 34:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, okay, but that's one thing to turn yourself off, but it doesn't mean, I don't think you're saying that you don't still stand in awe or appreciation of the science.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Completely fascinated by it.

• 34:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Yeah, yeah, so I like the fact that he still is impressed with what science can do. And, because so many people in America, they hate science forever, right? And then they become anti-science.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  We try to prevent that in the classroom, but if we can do around, there's some really interesting projects. We talked about computer mapping and trying to get people to learn science differently. He's right on. In fact, in the University of Central Florida, there is a project called the Meteor Project, where a kid...

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Meteor as in meteor that comes into space?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but it's an attempt to teach people about gravity science using computer simulations. You put electrodes and sensors on a kid, bring him into a room, and he or she pretends to be an asteroid trying to go through and set into orbit, for example, around the planet. So actually, they're using their body as a kinesthetic method to learn science.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is all from cinema? I mean, from movie magic?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Right, movie magic type stuff. And there are scores, and they're trying to find different ways to get people to not just learn on paper how to write stuff.

• 35:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but I'm thinking of the video game Asteroids where you shoot them out of the sky.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So who's shooting the asteroid kids? As they're going around and that's what I watch.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  That might be in face too. They asked the National Science Foundation what they're going to fund. But this is legitimate science education research as well as just having a good time. Isn't that what's important? Don't we all learn best when we're having a good time while we're doing it?

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  It doesn't have to be something that's easy, right? It's hard to make a jump shot, you know? It's hard to do a mute grab on your board. But people will work on it for hour after hour, day after day, year after year. Because they're having a good time.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they're having a good time. And when he described his role as a surgeon, that was a, he was operating on a, on a child that had a condition, what was it called? Blue baby, blue baby condition. And so he had to think about how the heart worked and all that. We gotta wrap up this hour, but great having you guys here. My God.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Such a pleasure.

• 36:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was a good time. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. You can find us on the web, startalkradio.net. Where else would that be, of course? And we're brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. A shout out for the NSF. Yes. Keeping science flowing through the river channels of our nation. And by extension, the world. And by our radio signal, the universe. As always, keep looking up. Neil deGrasse Tyson, signing off.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see a lot of them will say that they are feeling it. Right. So nothing external to them created the stimulus. Right.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  But they create the stimulus in us.

• 37:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  They themselves, whether or not they feel it, can convince us that they feel it. That's a scientific thing in the receiving side, not just a transmission side.

• 37:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which makes the really good, which means they're really good emotional liars. I wonder what it is to be married to an actor? Awful. Can't trust him. You don't know. Are they lying or are they telling the truth? Of course. I still love you, honey. Right. It's like, nah.

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta start wrapping this up. My gosh, oh, this was fun. Such a good time. Chuck and Charles? Charles and Chuck? Thanks for being on Start. You've been on Start Talk before. Yes. This will not be your last time. Thank you so much. And Chuck, I'm gonna find you on Friday night. My sister, who loves Home and Garden Television, she's gonna find you by accident. That's right. She's gonna call me in panic.

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Will it be creepy? No, it won't be creepy, only if I actually came in your home. You've been listening to Start Talk Radio, worked you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Give it up for the NSF. Yes. I'm your host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and as always, I bid you to keep looking up.