Many Thanks, All the right moviesfor digging up this old interview with Bob Hoskins, in which the award-winning British actor talks about the time he landed the job of playing Mario in the theatrical adaptation of Nintendo’s 1993 series.
“I didn’t even know it was a game,” Hoskins tells the interviewer, amused. “That’s what my kids told me. They said ‘What’s your next movie’ and I said ‘Super Mario Bros’.”
“Oh, that’s the game!”
“Oh oh what?”
“Yes, here, and that’s you!”
“And I saw this thing bouncing up and down and I thought [pause] “I used to play King Lear”.
The King Lear thing is funny, of course, but it’s the break that gets me. The pause that lets the world know that right now, at this moment, Hoskins is telling the full seriousness of the situation he found himself in.
He Has played King Lear (and also appeared in performances of Othello and Romeo and Juliet). He has also won a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a BAFTA and a Best Actor Award at Cannes. He was awarded as J. Edgar Hoover in NixonFantastic as George in Mona Lisa and illuminates the screen The long Good Friday.
However, here he is Mario. Starring in a movie, despite recent attempts to reconstruct his reputationis abysmal in almost every way, so bad that it stopped Nintendo from making another film decades.
We were all in that moment. When the passage of time seems to stop altogether, allowing us a rare glimpse back at the full extent of the cruel and calculating turns she’s taken along the way, at the breathtaking distance she’s traveled in our lives. We have all been King Lear at some point in our lives. And finallywe will all be Mario too.
