As someone cast mostly as a laid-back hippie for the last 50 years, Tommy Chong just keeps on trucking.
A co-star in the week’s well-regarded horror picture “Color Out of Space” Chong, naturally, plays a laid-back hippie hermit in an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story.
Last year he was disguised as Pineapple on “The Masked Singer” crooning Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”
Now he’s dedicating a new version of his autobiographical song “Does Your Momma Know About Me?” — recorded by Diana Ross and the Supremes among others — “to Meghan, of Prince Harry and Meghan. I am going to post it,” Chong, 81, said this week, quoting his lyric as especially relevant: “Will she turn her back on me or accept me as I am?”
As for “Color Out of Space,” Chong is completely cool being typecast now and forever as a stoned hippie — after all, he’s been promoting marijuana legalization pretty much his entire life.
“I started playing good music when I smoked marijuana. I was 17 when I first started and it was always the marijuana that got me inspired to do music, inspired to do comedy and inspired to do movies. It’s always been the weed.”
Does he feel partly responsible that legal weed is a reality?
“No kidding! I was talking about doing a show (calling myself) ‘The Pope of Dope.’ I love it!
“My reward now,” he said, “I’ve been hobnobbing with a lot of very wealthy people and their claim to fame with their kids is me. The kids want to meet me. It’s a nice calling card, especially with creative people.
“I was coming out of my health club and David Chappelle came over and gave me a hug. For my son who was with me, that was a thrill of a lifetime.”
“Color Out of Space” happened just because helmer Richard Stanley “had been following my career somewhat and decided I’d be a good hermit.”
His Ezra is evacuated from the bucolic woods when a meteorite lands and infects first the water, then a local family — Nicolas Cage and Joely Richardson, their three kids, herd of llamas and family dog — who soon suffer hideously bizarre transformations.
One thing Chong discovered tripping back before the cameras, “With movies, it comes down to how quiet you can talk.
“My problem was I could never hear what the actors are saying because I’ve got a hearing problem. Richard had to feed me lines. It’s a very collaborative thing.”
