A Conversation with Alan Rickman (Part 1)

In Part 1, Neil deGrasse Tyson chats with Alan Rickman about the craft of acting, the problems with the education system, and how he chooses and prepares for roles.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:59Speaker 02

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

• 2:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Welcome back, man.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Hey Neil.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Love having you.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  I love being here, man.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  And you get into all kinds of stuff. First, you're tweeting at ChuckNiceComic.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  At ChuckNiceComic.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Other Chuck Nices were taken, I'm told.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, screw the rest of those Chuck Nices.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  You were just slow.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  With the comic on there.

• 2:56Speaker 02

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

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Yes. Imagine that. A black man home evasion show.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's called Home Strange Home, man.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Home Strange Home.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Me going around to some of the weirdest and most unique homes in America.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  And calling them out.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  And calling them out, yeah.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  And what network?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  HGTV.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Home and Garden Television.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Home and Garden.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  That is my sister's favorite network.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  I love her.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Every speed dial button goes to that network.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  My kind of women.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  So, I'm not gonna tell her. She's gonna find you by accident.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  She's there. I got with me also my friend and colleague, Charles Liu.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Great to see you.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Professor Liu.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:36Speaker 02

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

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  And I've got you here because we're featuring my interview clips with Alan Rickman.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Yes, Alan Rickman.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Alan Rickman.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  By Grand Star's hammer, you shall be avenged.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  No, I didn't.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Galaxy Quest.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  I didn't know this in advance.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  That was it?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yes, you did. This is good or bad. You'll find out.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Good reference, bad impersonation.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  So Alan Rickman, you may know him from his role in Harry Potter. He was

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Sneak.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  creepy. Define the word creepy. He's it. In Harry Potter, of course, he was in Die Hard, one of the greatest villain roles ever.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  He was in Galaxy Quest, how it can't be a movie as there ever was, in Dogma, many other films. And he was also in Bottle Shot.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Bottle Shot.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Bottle Shot, yeah, yeah. A big fan of that and you know for folks who are sort of sort of A-list guests like that 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. 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?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Put it this way, when I did my very last physics exam, I got 4%. That would be four marks out of 100.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  96 because you lost 4.

• 5:23Speaker 04

  I got 4 marks.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  In your physics?

• 5:25Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  What's the corresponding year in school in America that that would be?

• 5:42Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:00Speaker 02

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

• 6:03Speaker 04

  Well, at least I had an option.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  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...

• 6:14Speaker 04

  No, actually, there was somebody in my year who, because 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...

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Which is a very UK thing to do, right?

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I don't 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, he did physics, maths and art. And he wound up being an art teacher. And I'm sure all the better for having had science in his life.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Wow, so yeah, we got 4% on his physics. I'm not gonna ask you what percent you got on your physics. Chuck, I'm turning to you on this one.

• 6:54Speaker 01

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

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Ooh, was it private school?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  It was, it was a prep school.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Prep school, okay.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  And it was academically advanced. I was not academically advanced. And so I failed physics and...

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Oh, now it comes out.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  But what did...

• 7:18Speaker 02

  That's when he said, "I think I'll be a comedian." And pull fun on a physics radio show, yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  But I, I loved science and I really felt like, man, I can't believe I'm, I, I failed this class and I blame the teacher.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  That is the right thing to do. I am so in favor of that.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  I blame the teacher.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  So you're, you're an educator.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 02

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

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  But still embrace the meaning of science. Cause when Alan Rickman said he got 4%, he wasn't bad mouthing science.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  He just got 4%.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 7:55Speaker 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."

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 03

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

• 8:10Speaker 02

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

• 8:13Speaker 03

  The information that used to have to be forced into you as training for something is no longer that constrained in the classroom. You can get it anywhere, like all over the world, online.

• 8:23Speaker 02

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

• 8:27Speaker 03

  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."

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  And I'm totally comfortable with that.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  What did it for me, though, was...

• 8:57Speaker 02

  So you were burning effigy recently.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  That's fine, that's...

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Did you do well in any science class?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Ah, your chemistry teacher?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  My chemistry teacher gave me this.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Good for your chemistry teacher.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Because 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.

• 9:31Speaker 02

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

• 9:33Speaker 01

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

• 9:38Speaker 02

  That's great, and you became a comedian.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. But astronomy is often a gateway, science.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  We're back, StarTalk Radio. By the way, you can find us three ways. First, just simply on the web, it's stargtloradio.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.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, I feel the same way. And my roots are deep in broadcast radio.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so thanks for that. And Chuck, you were a radio broadcaster in college.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yes, I was.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Excellent, so we, let's put on our radio voices.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're good, alright.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Well, I did punk rock once in a while, so it was like, "Oh, how you doing?" It's another hospital.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Minus, minus, minus.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  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, how's that message going from the brain to 10 fingers and dividing that information up? And also, 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.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  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, if someone, if someone had an idea, they say, "We're gonna cast doctors." Consider, was it in the 1960s, that movie, that Ozzie Gassimov story, Fantastic Voyage, where the vessel, the Proteus, I think it was called, shrunk. There's some, there's some important diplomat that has a brain tumor. And he might die, but they they have found a laser that could fix it, but they have to shrink down the laser and get inside and do it.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  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 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 sixties and and I'm just curious, those those sound like intriguing roles and if if you if you feel that.

• 13:49Speaker 04

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

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Well, so.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  That's all right. No, that's that's enjoyable too. I like 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 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

• 14:31Speaker 04

  to mime doing a heart operation because it was about Alfred Blaylock who did the first Blue Baby operation.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when you're an actor, you don't know what you're going to 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?

• 14:51Speaker 03

  I do play the piano.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Did you play piano too?

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Ah, no longer.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  No longer.

• 14:56Speaker 01

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

• 15:00Speaker 03

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

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Have you run the other way?

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  What kind of training does that take?

• 15:23Speaker 03

  But you literally don't have enough. Of 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.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  So that's, so you're training.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  So you train, so, so.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  I feel the same way at the Source Awards.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  You know? It's like if you hear pop, pop, you don't need to think, you just wow.

• 15:57Speaker 02

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

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Your motor neuro kinetic response.

• 16:05Speaker 01

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

• 16:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:26Speaker 02

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

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Precisely.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  They can just.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Be the 20 hour expert, right. And again, that takes.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  But they have to know how to mimic.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  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 motor neuro ability to find a way to reach those specific aspects that appear to be excellent to others and be able to communicate.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  Because your brain has added the information.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  It kept going. And 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.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  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 typing sequence. I did it with a memory sequence. The next day I was better. And so the brain is working.

• 17:59Speaker 03

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

• 18:04Speaker 02

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

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Right. 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.

• 18:18Speaker 02

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

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Oh, chemistry, alchemy, magic.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Magic.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Who knows what it is?

• 18:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so, so.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Take an iPhone back to colonial America.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  No, take it back 10 years ago. You'd still be burned at the stake.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Right, right. So for an actor to learn to be another whole person, I'm intrigued to, 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.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  On the other hand.

• 19:31Speaker 02

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

• 19:36Speaker 03

  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 over there. You're going, oh, forget it, man. Yeah, I'm switching the channel.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  I'm not taking you to the next.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  Or the next taping of Big Bang Theory.

• 19:55Speaker 02

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

• 20:01Speaker 03

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

• 20:07Speaker 02

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

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• 25:07Speaker 02

  We're back on StarTalk. Today we are featuring my interview with Alan Rickman. Listen to that guy all day.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  No, that is not a good imitation.

• 25:17Speaker 01

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

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, but then you want that, you know?

• 25:24Speaker 03

  But his last line in the last movie, "You have your mother's eyes, such pathos." You just want to shed a tear for the dude.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanted to shed a tear for that impression.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  That's why you're the comedian and I'm the astronomy.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  No, I'm glad you did it because mine sucked, but that one.

• 25:42Speaker 02

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

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Ah!

• 25:56Speaker 02

  That's one of those OE words.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Ornology, yes.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:14Speaker 02

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

• 26:17Speaker 03

  That I know. You have to let me finish my sentence.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Okay, fine.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  But the bottom line is...

• 26:22Speaker 02

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

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Didn't see Sideways either.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  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 chronicled the, 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 grape. You put the plantings here in America and they're trying to compete. And there was a contest in 1976, our bicentennial year. It was all up with America. And the French said, "Let's have a contest. You guys are so uppity.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Let's put in 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.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Right? You can't know in advance, because then you don't trust the judges.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Especially the French.

• 27:36Speaker 01

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

• 27:40Speaker 02

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

• 28:06Speaker 04

  That's not so difficult.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Had to do your homework for Bottle Shock.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  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.

• 28:25Speaker 02

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

• 28:28Speaker 04

  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.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  And snobs, basically.

• 28:47Speaker 04

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

• 28:53Speaker 02

  That's an extraordinary story.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  But it was the departure from anything to do with the realities 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.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Oh, right, right, right. But it was visually stunning. Right, yeah, look, it looked good. Yeah, so, so there he was, so 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 nineteen seventy-three Stag's Leap. Stag's Leap? Cask twenty-three. Wow. And was it actually that good? Stag's Leap, nineteen seventy-three. Now, now, back then, and still, California wines tend to mature sooner than French wines. So, when the French lost this contest, they would then say, oh, well, the American, because it's nineteen seventy-six was the contest, these American wines.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  The other French wines were in the early seventies, right? So they would say, oh, ours has not shown well yet. Come back and.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Three years. We will see who wins then. Big.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  By then, it was too late. Genie was out of the bottle.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Time Magazine was present at the tasting and they ended up writing about it. No other American press was interested in covering it.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  You know, there is a California wine called Rocket Science.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Yes. In fact, I had some of that yesterday.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  As good as Stag's Lee?

• 30:25Speaker 02

  They're coming along.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  But actually, I'm a stalker for a wine label that has cosmic themes.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Just check it out. There's some with moons and planets and stars.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  All night.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  It's the lucky charms of wine.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  The Yellow Brick Road, that's the next one.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so 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, my interview with Alan Rickman.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Alan Rickman.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Alan Rickman.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Who else more?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Okay, you're right. Doesn't stop us from trying.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  We will kick your ass with science.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  We will blind them.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  What's right, blind? Drop some science on them, sir.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Snap. So Alan Rickman didn't only do Bottle Shock, he also did one of the campiest, funniest movies ever, Galaxy Quest.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Doctor Lazarus.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know how many people out there saw the film.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  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 had to protect their civilization or something, want them to help them.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Cause they thought it was real, cause they got the television signals.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  From, they went out into space.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  We have, we have seen your historical.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  It was every Trekkie's fantasy come true.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, as a Star Trek fan.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  Every Star Trek fan.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  Cause you want it to be real and the aliens thought it was real. So Alan Rickman played Doctor Lazarus, right? Is it in the Galaxy Quest TV show?

• 33:21Speaker 03

  By Grabfar's hammer, you shall be a V.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  I just, let's go straight to that clip. I just asked him, what, how does this fit into your, your, your acting repertoire? Let's find out what he said.

• 33:37Speaker 04

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

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Oh, that's what's good.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Who were all trapped in a really bad TV show.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  That's right. You were portraying an actor on that. That just didn't occur to me to think that that was.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  A bad actor.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Who, 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.

• 34:16Speaker 02

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

• 34:19Speaker 04

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

• 34:28Speaker 02

  The premise is just so crazy. I mean, it's.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  It was brilliant.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Fun, crazy premise. And I'm, I'm glad you did it, cause it was, it's there.

• 34:39Speaker 02

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

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, and humanoid form.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  But they had humanoid form when they were interacting with us. But when you saw them in their true form.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  They were disgusting.

• 35:02Speaker 02

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

• 35:05Speaker 03

  No, they're awesome.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Completely freak out. 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.

• 35:20Speaker 03

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

• 35:24Speaker 02

  He looked a little grumpy in that role, right?

• 35:26Speaker 03

  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, "By Grabthar's hammer, what a savings."

• 35:44Speaker 02

  At the store.

• 35:45Speaker 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.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  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 shit is this? My God! I'm stealing money!

• 36:53Speaker 02

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

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• 38:46Speaker 02

  We're back at StarTalk Radio featuring my interviews with Alan Rickman. Alan Rickman. Alan Rick. 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 a Chuck Nice comic.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  And you're tweeting too.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  I am. I am at Chuck Liu, C H U C K L I U.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Chuck Liu. So education things and fun cosmic things?

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Pretty much.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  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, you have no feeling for it, you can't embrace it,

• 39:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  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, like 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?

• 40:49Speaker 04

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

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Go for it.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  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.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  The key for individualized teaching, that's what that comes down to.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  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.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 41:39Speaker 04

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

• 41:45Speaker 04

  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.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  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 fill in the rest of the sentence.

• 42:03Speaker 04

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

• 42:06Speaker 02

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

• 42:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  I love it. I like that.

• 42:14Speaker 04

  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.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  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 science.

• 42:36Speaker 04

  Completely fascinated by it.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:49Speaker 03

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

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Meteor as in meteor, they come into space.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 43:27Speaker 02

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

• 43:31Speaker 03

  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, but on their feet.

• 43:39Speaker 02

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

• 43:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  So who's shooting the asteroid kids? They're going around, and that's what I want.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  That might be in phase two, past the National Science Foundation, that they're going to fund. But this is legitimate science education research, as well. 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?

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  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's it called?

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Blue baby.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Blue baby condition. And so he had to think about how the heart worked and all that. But we got to wrap up this hour, but great having you guys here. My God.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Such a pleasure.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  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. So a shout out for the

• 44:47Speaker 03

  NSF.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  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.

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