Chris Fleming looks wistfully on the wave of YouTube content creators courted by Hollywood after Backrooms director Kane Parsons and Obsession’s Curry Barker notched runaway horror pic hits at the multiplex.
“I missed that. Yea, I missed that,” the American comedian and actor first known for his absurdist YouTube series Gayle, where he played the titular stay-at-home mom Gayle Water-Waters, tells The Hollywood Reporter at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal.
“The industry didn’t care. But the people cared,” Fleming recalled, which allowed Gayle to run for just over three years to 2015. But it was a long road from a YouTube series that missed Hollywood’s radar to his first HBO streaming special, Chris Fleming: Live at the Palace, which debuted in February.
“I’ve had a really solid career for the last 10 years or so, where I’ve been able to do theaters for my own fan base. But the HBO special and the success of that has blown things through roof,” Fleming explained. For starters, he’s in demand for movie and TV series gigs.
“Before the special, I was struggling to do one acting gig a year. Now, since the special, there’s been many,” Fleming reports. Besides his frenetic and prancing stage presence and whimsical storytelling, Fleming’s HBO special was memorable for his purple bodysuit designed by Antony Sartino, who famously created wardrobes for the late rock star Prince.
As to whether streaming comedy specials continue to move the needle with audiences as major platforms increasingly focus on live events and sports, Fleming credits the arms race between Hulu, Amazon, Max, YouTube TV and Netflix with stand-up specials for turbocharging his career.
He accepts an increasingly fragmented media space means no project or performance can hold lasting firepower for a career like might have happened before the streaming and internet eras overtook the stand-up comedy world. “But my life before February was a different life than it’s been since February when (the comedy special) came out,” Fleming adds.
For one thing, he’s got two movie acting roles on the go that he can’t talk about yet, one of which has him in Montreal a week after getting a haircut that sheared off his long, wavy locks. “I had to cut my hair to play a normie husband, a religious guy, a new dad. So they wanted me to be unrecognizable, to not look at all like Chris Fleming. That’s why they did me dirty like this,” Fleming explains of being without his signature wolf cut.
The Just For Laughs comedy festival wraps on the weekend.
