“Musical talent” might be a bit of an exaggeration to describe Kristen Wiig, but the “Saturday Night Live” veteran hesitates when praised for her talent. So she’ll have to settle for another name.
How about “Oscar-nominated musician Kristen Wiig”?
Now it’s a real possibility: Netflix will campaign for Wiig and co-writer Sean Douglas in the original song category for the folk-comedy ditty “Harper and Will Go West” from the upcoming documentary “Will & Harper,” the company confirmed exclusively to The Times. The film, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, arrives on Netflix on Sept. 27 after an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run.
“Will & Harper” follows former “SNL” star Will Ferrell and his friend, longtime SNL writer Harper Steele, on a cross-country road trip after Steele comes out as transgender. Along the way, they meet trans people making a life for themselves in small-town America, discuss the challenges Steele faced pre- and post-transition and much more. They also park their classic Jeep Wagoneer to recruit Wiig, via FaceTime, to write a “tear-jerking, fun, upbeat, jazzy, country-inflected” theme song for their trip.
The resulting number, filmed in Wiig's backyard and accompanied by ukulele and saxophone, combines humor (the opening verse rhymes the song's title with the phrase “a couple brand new breasts”) and heartfelt emotion (“A friend is a friend is a friend… 'til the end”) in a way that reflects the film as a whole.
“It was kind of a funny thing when they called me and said they wanted me to go with all these different kinds of music,” laughs Wiig, who studied piano and sang in church and school choirs as a child, before taking up the ukulele in later years. But rather than a full-on parody, she, Douglas and the film’s director, Josh Greenbaum, decided to “avoid anything too facetious”: “We just wanted a nice song for the two of us.”
Songs with humorous elements have made their way into the Oscars’ original song category before. The Academy nominated the satirical, profanity-laced song “Blame Canada” from “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” in 2000 and has more recently chosen songs like “Husavik,” from the 2020 comedy “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga,” and “I'm Just Ken,” from last year's blockbuster “Barbie.” The most recent winner, also from “Barbie,” was Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell's “What Was I Made For?”
