Paris Themmen (2014)

LOL. Yay!

I agree that at some point you're going to have to come to grips with the fact that your little girls are going to become little ladies. As to when and how to break the news to them, I can't really advise you there. I can tell you that I've had some experience with this at my convention autograph signing table. I find that six years old is usually the cutoff. If a parent approaches my table with an under-six-year-old, and says, "Look, honey, that's Mike Teevee," the reaction will range from tears to hiding behind their pant leg to a crestfallen look of disbelief. Not only am I not on TV, but I'm 55 instead of 11. This is too much for their minds to conceive. It sounds like you're in deep, and I wish you Godspeed. Slugworth passed some time ago, so you're safe there. Ice, ice, baby.

Okay, that's an interesting one. Because Charlie and Grandpa Joe bounced around the Fizzy Lifting Drinks ceiling prior to Mike's indiscretions in the TV room, it has been suggested that I should have won the contest (I was the last to go before Charlie). No one has ever pointed out to me before that I never had the opportunity to return the Gobstopper. The Gobstopper, by now, would have been a couple of microns tall. In my opinion, the whole thing was rigged from the beginning. Charlie even lives in Wonka's town! The fix was in.

Like our initial entrance to the Chocolate Room, the director did not warn us what was coming in this scene. Mike Teevee enjoys pretty much the entire factory tour. The boat is the one place where he exhibits fear and discomfort. Gene is so great in this scene, and it didn't take much acting on our part to play "What the fuck is wrong with this guy?"

Gene was fantastic. He was very gentle and soft-spoken most of the time, except for the occasional outburst on film - can you say the boat trip? But I don't have to tell you all that he is a brilliant actor and a comedic genius.

The Oompa Loompas were notoriously mischievous. They were often drunk after a day's shooting. We all stayed in a hotel together. In those days, when you wanted to have your shoes shined, you'd leave them outside of your hotel room door. One night the Oompa Loompas grabbed all the shoes, tied the laces together, and left them in a pile to be found in the morning.

Remake? Huh?

Yes, once for lunch. He was very tall and imperious.

The Candy Man can, but that's not, I mean... Oh, I see what you did there.

I'm a Veruca fan. She was a lovely, demure British girl and now she's my closest friend from the film. Augustus didn't speak much English then. Now he does. He's an accountant still living in Munich.

$500/week for nine weeks and a trip to Germany for me and my family, where the film was shot.

Definitely more a blessing than a curse. I'm not dead yet, but clearly this is going to be the thing that I'm best remembered for, and I'm OK with that because Wonka is so awesome.

Yay! Went to a Halloween party as Strongbad once.

Don't be sad. They'll live forever on film.

Here on this AMA, when a guy asked how I felt about not having to give back my Everlasting Gobstopper. But your point is well taken. As I sit at my table at conventions, the vast majority of the questions that are asked of me are repeats. I am hoping that Reddit will provide some fresh perspective.

Spoiler alert: The gummy bears in the Pure Imagination room were mostly plastic with a gummy ear. This is an example of how they did it. In general, if we ate it on film it was real, and if not, it was fake. Visually, the room was unbelievable.

Yes, pretty stinky.

I appear in The Big Lebowski basically as a featured extra (you can see me bowling during the scenes in the bowling alley and the title sequence), so I only have so much of a right to comment on the film. But the Coen Brothers are seminal filmmakers and I love all their films.

I get residuals when the film is shown on network TV, not for cable, DVD, or VHS sales. The contract between the signatory producers and SAG that covered those ancillary markets was signed six months after I signed my contract. Ouch.

Unfortunately it's kind of foggy because I was only eleven at the time. I remember that it happened but in this case I don't have details for you.

Yes, we did eat several types of candy on set. My favorite candy was actually the "gum" that Violet eats and is a three-course meal. That actually wasn't gum but was a very tasty toffee-based candy. It was used in close-ups so they didn't have very many of them, and after I ate a couple I asked for a third one and they wouldn't give it to me. They used a lot of marzipan on set because it was easy to color and form into shapes.

I hear these theories from time to time. In addition to the seven deadly sins version, many think that Grandpa Joe was a jerk (the character, not the actor). Also, that Wonka knew the kids were going to die one by one, as evidenced by the number of seats on the Wonkatania and the Wonkamobile. Also, lots of questions about whether the Wonka tour is a psychedelic experience. Personally, I don't believe any of them. Blue.

1. 9 men, 1 woman. They were sourced from circuses around Europe - British, Turkish. Three are still alive - Rusty Goffe, Malcolm Dixon, and Albert Wilkinson. They have appeared in several iconic geek films. See their Wikis for more.

I have a superpower now. I have the power to freak people out by telling them I was Mike Teevee. I try not to be gauche but I don't shy away from making use of the fact.

Yes. Those who recognize me most readily are people who have seen the film a million times, people who have seen me do extra features or appearances as an adult, people who have photographic memories, and visual artists who can see the child's face in the man.

Wallpaper.

Have a backup career. It's always good to follow your dreams, but there are so many wannabe actors out there that only a small percentage of them are ultimately successful.

This is another one of those spoiler alert questions that I feel weird about answering because there may be kids reading this. The river was made of water with food coloring. At one point, they poured some cocoa powder into it to try to thicken it but it didn't really work. When asked this question, Michael Böllner, who played Augustus Gloop, answers, "It vas dirty, stinking vater."

Of the five kids, I was two years younger and the most rambunctious. So other than Charlie, who was and is a sweetheart, yes, I was the brattiest.

Yes, all of them. We do Comic-Con-type conventions together. At this point, maybe once a year. During the years between 1971-1998, none of us had seen each other at all, but in '98 we all found each other again. Interestingly, Michael had no idea that he was famous until they approached him at that point.

I worked as an actor from 6 to 16. I did a couple dozen commercials, three Broadway shows, some voiceover work, and Willy Wonka. Then I studied at NYU and got my degree in theatre. I took a long break from film, did some more commercials in my 30s, and sometimes do background work on film and TV here in NYC. I also have worked on several films behind the scenes, mostly as a production assistant, sometimes as an assistant director, and a bit here and there in other departments. If you're really good, you'll see me walking around in the background of The Good Wife on CBS.

Yes, that's right.

Excellent. I just got married on June 21st. And fortunately she's a really fast AMA typist.

(LOL) Either never or on set. But in any case, not for forty years.

There's a voiceover that you can just barely hear about all the things I'm doing in her purse. If you crank it all the way up, you might hear me saying, "Let me outta here" and that I'm going to bend the tines in her comb and spread lipstick all over the inside of her purse. We recorded that in post.

A guy came up to my table at a convention. He wanted me to put my autograph on his arm. He intended to tattoo it there later on. He showed me other tattooed autographs all over his body. Yeesh. I did it.

Thanks, good to be here! I already answered this one - anything we ate was actual candy.

(laughing) I don't know, do I want to answer that question? I'm certainly aware of the train wrecks that some child actors have become as adults, so I do my best to successfully navigate that obstacle course.

Ham.

Willy Wonka was not a huge success at the time that it came out, so it's not like I was suddenly very famous. Its popularity grew when they started showing it once a year on TV. But if you're asking if a child actor who has fame hits adulthood and is disappointed that their childhood fame didn't grow and grow, yes. That's true, but it became my job to fill my life with other interesting experiences. We're getting into existential terrain here, but each of us has to cherish each moment we're alive and continue to find meaning.

Thank you!

Roy Kinnear was another very funny actor. Unfortunately, he eventually died when he fell off a horse during the shoot of one of the Musketeers films. He joked around with the kids a lot and was a very nice man.

Right.

Weird. Great. Lucky. It had to be someone. It turns out it was me. How do we try to explain life? All I know is that it continues to affect my life these many years later, and I'm really glad that it was a piece that is not only known by so many people but loved by so many people.

I was there in '90, '91, during the Eisner years. But my contention that they are "right-wing" can be traced all the way back to Walt. When I was in Imagineering, I was super impressed by the talent and intelligence of all the people that worked there, but I myself grew up with kind of a hippie background. You know, it's Disney. They're conservative; they're tough business negotiators; their cast members dress conservatively. You know, they're, whatchamacallit - their films project a sense of, "MURICA."

Absolutely. Every day a new set, awesome script, great actors, candy, Golden Tickets. What could be bad?

The answer is no, I haven't. Is that like Girls Gone Wilder or Gene Gone Wilder?

Let's assume your daughter is less than six. In which case the answer is yes, definitely. And the river was really chocolate.

Yes, it was. And as you can tell from my proof photo, those days are long gone.

A violin.

Pretty much everything that Roald Dahl wrote has that cool, macabre sense to it. One that I like is a short story with the woman who murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then serves it to the detective. I remember another one in Playboy that was called "Bitch" and was all about people marketing a pheromone-based perfume.

I think what's most awesome and interesting about Willy Wonka is the way that it appeals to kids and adults. Both Roald Dahl and Mel Stuart, the director, consciously tried not to talk down to kids. For this reason, adults enjoy watching it with their kids and the daisy chain of popularity moves down through the generations.

When I got out of school I was fortunate enough to start a travel agency in New York and Paris. It's one of the crazy entrepreneurial things I've done in my life. That's when I got the travel bug and started all of my international traveling. I sold that business a couple years later and paid off my student loans with that money. I was lucky.

Was there a remake?

Lobster.

I saw an internet video where he grew up and was the owner of a film studio. That's a decent future for him. He would have had to get past the whole stretched-out-in-the-taffy-pulling-machine thing, though.

Willy Wonka was cast by Marion Dougherty. She was famous for bringing in a few people rather than a ton, and that was the case with me. One audition, one callback, and then I got the phone call I was going to Germany. There was no script yet, so we read scenes from the book.

I read the book, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" with my mother for the very first time the night before my audition. That gave me some idea of what to expect. But they definitely held back some surprises. They wanted to film our initial reactions to the Chocolate Room set, so it was a closed set until they opened the door, let us in, and we saw the river running, the waterfall flowing, 360 degrees of a panoramic chocolate wonderland.

The wallpaper tasted like wallpaper.

Happy Cake Day!

Yes, I do. I answered this elsewhere as well. I talk to Julie the most.