by Zach Raffio. @zachraffio.
HOBOKEN, NJ - The King Kong puppet - last seen on stage as the titular star of the 2018-2019 Broadway musical - made sure to remind all his friends that he auditioned for the blockbuster feature Godzilla vs. Kong while watching the film on HBO Max, sources close to the puppet confirmed.
“I think I had a really strong read. I made some bold choices and could tell the casting directors were into it,” said the puppet, who was already a stretch by being a real life puppet controlled by over a dozen puppeteers and not CGI like the gorilla who booked the part. “My agent said they didn’t do callbacks for the movie but that I definitely wouldn’t have gotten one if they did. He kept reminding me not to ask anyone about callbacks, though, because they ‘definitely didn’t happen’ and I would sound ‘silly’ asking about callbacks that ‘for sure, really didn’t happen’.”
Devin Coopers, one of the puppets’ seven roommates and a fellow thespian, did his best to support his so-close pal.
“There are just some rejections that hurt more than others,” said Coopers, who shares a bedroom with the King Kong puppet and, no, can’t really fit in the bedroom. “Still, he kept pausing the film to tell us how he would have done the chest pound, or how he would have climbed that building, or worst of all, how he would have delivered that line - and by ‘line’, I of course mean ‘big, big roar’. At a certain point it’s like… just respect the fake work that fake gorilla really fake did.”
Leanne DaSsimo, the film’s casting director, weighed in on the puppet’s performance.
“He kept apologizing, saying he’s much more of a stage actor and didn’t know which camera to look in, even though there was only one,” noted DaSsimo, who made a point of confirming that there were, indeed, callbacks. “He also kept doing an accent. I know you might be thinking that’s impossible, and I can’t really explain it, but trust me, he was doing one. And it was not tasteful.”
At press time, the King Kong puppet wasn’t letting anything keep him down. He was last seen preparing for a reading of a hybrid bio-musical about the lives of puppeteer Jim Henson and primatologist Jane Goodall, as well as a podcast in which he interviews other 2,000 pound theatre puppets (he has yet to book any guests). He vehemently denies making several alt accounts to flood Twitter with negative reviews of Godzilla vs. Kong, especially not the ones that claim Kong “could use more MT energy”, “should have been a puppet”, and that the casting “could have benefitted from callbacks”.