I wanted the Andy Kaufman role in Man On The Moon so badly that I auditioned on tape and took a big cut in my usual fee. Andy's character consumed me. He was like a wild animal. He'd open his eyes in the morning and the circus began. I went to bed as Andy, I woke up and jumped into his shoes.
I have always been a fan. Andy Kaufman was a situationist comedian. He rose to fame in the late Seventies when he was the mechanic Latka in the television series Taxi, but he was not a sitcomland person. He grew from being an Elvis impersonator to a performer who broke all the rules. He was an anarchic comedian. He didn't look for laughs, he preferred to test audience endurance with surreal experiments in banality. He would sabotage them, and himself, relentlessly. When he died of lung cancer at 35 in 1984 many believed his death was really just another gag.
For me there was some sort of physical transformation doing this role. Director Milos Forman found he had to deal with Andy, not me, or Andy's alter ego Tony Clifton. He didn't know what to think for the first couple of weeks but he settled into it. Even Andy's family treated me like Andy. But there was no real Andy Kaufman. He'd step off the stage and he was performing again. To him the whole world was a stage, which is one of the reasons why Andy is such a mesmerising personality. I don't think even his girlfriend Lynne, played by Courtney Love, knew what was for real or not.
