Fifty-five years after he shot to fame on the groundbreaking British sketch comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, John Cleese has hardly slowed down.
In addition to several simmering TV and film projects, Cleese, 84, is writing a stage adaptation of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Also in the works is a stage play of Fawlty Towers, the sitcom he created post-Flying Circus, as well as a Broadway-bound “comedy/musical” version of the Oscar-nominated film A Fish Called Wanda.
“The thing about getting older—and I really mean this—is that I think you become more authentic,” Cleese recently told me. “You have less energy for nonsense. But I have plenty of energy for things that I’m interested in.”
Just a few years ago, after reuniting with his Monty Python pals in 2013 and releasing an excellent memoir, it seemed Cleese was taking a victory lap of sorts. But the actor and comedian—who in recent years has also become the bane of both the left and right, interestingly on social media, where he came under fire last week for listing five ways that “Hitler was preferable to Trump”—seems to have more on his to-do list than ever. These days, that includes setting the record straight on some Monty Python lore.
Cleese, who co-wrote and starred in three seasons of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus television show, as well as three Python films, plus fellow Python Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, is now in the early stages of writing the second volume of his memoir. He promises this one will be “all Python; 100 percent. Not just the television series, but the films, too.”
“A lot of research has been done,” Cleese tells me the day after Christmas—shortly before posting the aforementioned Hitler tweet—from the California home he’s rented for the next few months.
As a result of that research, Cleese sounds excited to tell the story of who wrote what behind the scenes of Monty Python, and how the fabled troupe’s most anarchic, astonishing sketches and scenes came to life.
While Cleese normally wrote with Chapman,