Chris Fleming looks wistfully on the wave of YouTube content creators courted by Hollywood after Backrooms director Kane Parsons and Obsession’s Curry Barker notched runaway horror pic hits at the multiplex.
“I missed that. Yea, I missed that,” the American comedian and actor first known for his absurdist YouTube series Gayle, where he played the titular stay-at-home mom Gayle Water-Waters, tells The Hollywood Reporter at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal.
“The industry didn’t care. But the people cared,” Fleming recalled, which allowed Gayle to run for just over three years to 2015. But it was a long road from a YouTube series that missed Hollywood’s radar to his first HBO streaming special, Chris Fleming: Live at the Palace, which debuted in February.
“I’ve had a really solid career for the last 10 years or so, where I’ve been able to do theaters for my own fan base. But the HBO special and the success of that has blown things through roof,” Fleming explained. For starters, he’s in demand for movie and TV series gigs.
“Before the special, I was struggling to do one acting gig a year. Now, since the special, there’s been many,” Fleming reports. Besides his frenetic and prancing stage presence and whimsical storytelling, Fleming’s HBO special was memorable for his purple bodysuit designed by Antony Sartino, who famously created wardrobes for the late rock star Prince.
