Pauly Shore admits to Consequence that when people first started mentioning the similarities between him and fitness icon Richard Simmons, the idea of playing the man in a biopic wasn’t something he imagined. “It was more like, I don’t want to say a joke, but it was more lighthearted. And then it just started to snowball.”
Said snowball just brought the comedian and ’90s icon to a place filled with snow — the 2024 Sundance Film Festival — after making headlines with the news that he would play Simmons in two different projects: A completed short film by viral filmmaker Jake Lewis, and a feature-length biopic currently in search of writers.
Shore tracks the beginning of people’s interest in him playing Simmons to a series of YouTube videos he made in 2020 called Sweating With the Wiez: “It was me working out in my backyard with a girlfriend — basically straight to the camera ‘Hey, let’s work out, da dah, dah dah.’ That’s the thing that catapulted the online chatter, then memes started popping up [saying] ‘Pauly Shore should play Richard Simmons.’ That’s when I started digging in and putting it out there, and then that kind of took off.”
Subsequently, Shore made a deal with the Wolper Organization for a feature-length biopic about Simmons, while at the same time agreeing to star in filmmaker Jake Lewis’s short. The two projects are technically separate, but came together “simultaneously,” Shore says. “The way that it works is that everyone works together — Jake supports us, we support him. Right now in the other room, Jake is actually sitting on the lap of producer Mark Wolper. So it’s one big kumbaya story.”
(I confess to Shore that I’m not sure if he’s joking or not, about the lap-sitting. “No, I’m being serious. We all just had lunch,” he says.)
The short film, The Court Jester, is not an official Sundance selection, but played at a Park City club called The Cabin on Friday, Jan. 19th, at a party hosted by Shore during the festival. The full short is now streaming online, featuring a fictionalized appearance by Richard Simmons on Ellen Degeneres’ now-defunct talk show (with Degeneres played by impersonator Tamra Brown).
To play Simmons in the short, Shore embarked on “the typical research, which is watching all [Simmons’] stuff. And I started reading his memoir, but didn’t finish it.” The biggest challenge, he notes, wasn’t learning the dance choreography “Richard” performs on Ellen, but learning the monologue from the second half of the film, in which “Richard” gives a young producer (Jesse Heiman) a pep talk. “That was the hardest, because you gotta learn a lot of stuff. A lot of dialogue.”
