John Cleese is making it clear that he – and a few other Pythons – are in complete disagreement with long-ago co-star Eric Idle, who last weekend slammed manager (and daughter of Python co-founder Terry Gilliam) Holly Gilliam for what Idle suggested were the troupe’s dwindling finances.
“We own everything we ever made in Python and I never dreamed that at this age the income streams would tail off so disastrously,” Idle posted on X/Twitter Saturday. “But I guess if you put a Gilliam child in as your manager you should not be so surprised. One Gilliam is bad enough. Two can take out any company.”
Cleese left no doubt where he stands on the matter.
“I have worked with Holly for the last ten years,” the Fawlty Towers creator tweeted today, “and I find her very efficient, clear-minded, hard-working, and pleasant to have dealings with.”
Cleese continued, “Michael Palin has asked me to to make it clear that he shares this opinion. Terry Gilliam is also in agreement with this.”
Apparently there’s no love lost between Cleese and Idle, with the latter responding, when asked by an X follower if the two remain close, “I haven’t seen Cleese for seven years.” When another follower replied saying that made him sad, Idle responded, “Why. It makes me happy.”
Today, Cleese responded with an assessment so blunt some followers wondered if it was all a gag: “We always loathed and despised each other, but it’s only recently that the truth has begun to emerge.”
Gag or not, Cleese’s comment is in line with a post by Idle’s daughter Lily, who wrote, “I’m so proud of my dad for finally starting to share the truth. He has always stood up to bullies and narcissists and absolutely deserves reassurance and validation for doing so.”
He called out Tony Stark in the same interview:
His criticism was for the whole Marvel body of work. That it implied that they only people who can do anything of value in the world are superheroes with vast resources, superhuman powers, and nominal limitations that disappear whenever the plot requires.
Black Panther was just the recent Marvel film at the time of the interview, but frankly I think it does highlight the exact problems he was talking about: T’Challa is the king of a fictional African superpower country with super science based on a fictional super-material, and in addition to his super-suit based on that fictional super-material, he also has super-powers from a fictional super-drug.
In context of the whole interview, the “bullshit” he doesn’t think is worth believing in is pretty clearly the externalization of all significant power and agency onto impossibly powerful fictional figureheads with no actual limitations, no actual struggles, unburdened by reality. It really sounds like he’s saying that people in general, kids in general, and yes black kids, should have something more realistic to believe in, which gives them agency, rather than implicitly sloughing all agency onto fictional superhero-kings. And again, he expressed this critique with the genre as a whole, not just the black superheroes.