Documentarian Louis Theroux brought Chris O’Dowd on his new BBC quarantine podcast Grounded on Monday to discuss how the actor got roped into doing that star-studded “Imagine” singalong video that was almost instantly met with widespread ridicule.
O’Dowd said that he initially agreed to be in the “tone-deaf” video because “I’ll do anything Kristen [Wiig] asks me to do, so of course we just did it. It took five minutes, didn’t think about it. I presumed it was for kids. I know that Gal [Gadot] works for UNICEF, so I presumed it was a charity thing.”
“Which would have been even more cruel, by the way,” Theroux quipped, “To make children listen to it. I think there are laws against that.”
O’Dowd went on to explain that the video came out of “that first wave of creative diarrhea” at the beginning of the pandemic and “was just a bunch of people running around thinking that they had to do something when we really didn’t. We just needed to chill out and take everything in.”
“I think any backlash was justified,” he continued, adding that it was “bizarre to be part of that maelstrom, I’m glad it’s over.”
But while a “wave of creative diarrhea” may explain away the origins of “Imagine,” it still doesn’t quite answer why celebs decided to double down on their viral video activism with that “I Take Responsibility” for racism montage just three months later.
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