Interviewing Steve Whitmire is more than a little surreal. He’s a master puppeteer and known for bringing characters like Rizzo the Rat, Ernie on Sesame Street, and Kermit the Frog to life. As a lifelong Muppet fan, maintaining professionalism was difficult, and words like “awesome” and “like” slipped into my questions more often than I’d expected.
My wife, Lindsay, and I spoke with him about his experience at GalaxyCon, his approach to playing Kermit, his work with Tim Curry on Muppet Treasure Island, and the possibility of casting the Muppets in non-Muppet films. I even quote Al Pacino at one point.
Is this your first GalaxyCon?
Well, I’ve done a lot of GalaxyCon shows over the years, and I really, of all the Comic-Cons that I’ve done, I really like this particular promoter’s shows. I think they’re a good size; they’re not gigantic, and they’re not super small, and you get a lot of variety and a lot of things to see. This is my 8th one this year. So I’m having a great time.
Have you had any favorite fan interactions throughout the day?
Well, you know, I always enjoy meeting the fans because when we did the work with The Muppets over the years, we were always in a studio. And we never worked in front of a live audience, so you don’t get to meet the fans. You know they’re out there, but you don’t get to meet them. So it’s a really nice thing to be able to just to hear their stories about the Muppets and how they’ve affected their lives, and maybe they have a favorite parent or grandparent who could introduce them to it and things like that.
How has your approach to Kermit changed throughout the years from your first movie all the way through the last movie?
Well, you probably know I’m not doing Kermit anymore. I was Kermit for about 27 years. And I’ll tell you about what was constant about it first. I always wanted it to remain true to what Jim had established as Kermit because Jim Henson was in Kermit for 35 years. And it was super important for me not to change him. A lot of people say, “Well, you have to make it your own,” but in Kermit’s case, I really wanted to make sure I didn’t do that. I wanted it to continue on as the character Jim had established so that people would continue to relate to him because they knew him so well.
He’s the core of The Muppets.
Yeah, you couldn’t change him. And you couldn’t go backwards with him. I couldn’t say, well, I liked what Jim did 20 years ago. I’m gonna go back. You have to; he has to continue to grow. And that’s the hard part. Is basing it on something solid so that it can evolve and grow, you know, evenly.
You worked on Muppet Vision 3D (at Disney World). What was it like working on a theme park show versus working on one of the Muppet TV shows or one of the movies?
Well, from our point of view, from the performance point of view, it was almost the same. We were just shooting a film, you know. And it was an interesting production because at that point in time, 3D was accomplished with two cameras shooting at the same time. So one would be your right eye, one would be your left eye. And there were these giant cameras that just clattered and made lots of noise. And they had to run in sync, and then they would break down, and we’d wait for hours while they tried to fix it. I’m sure, I have a feeling that these days 3D would be accomplished like somehow in the computer. You wouldn’t do it with two big, clunky cameras.
You know, but for us it was just the next project we were doing with Jim, and we were gonna do a hundred more and, you know, we didn’t know that he was gonna pass away. So it ended up being the last big thing we worked on.
Lindsay: So we really love your work on the 2011 The Muppets movie. We were wondering whether there were any emotional moments while filming scenes like “The Rainbow Connection” or “Pictures in My Head”?
Well, I’ll tell you what happened, and this is a real moment that really kind of almost shook me up a little bit. So I mean, I’d sung “Rainbow Connection” a hundred times as Kermit on various things, to kind of just do that as part of the repertoire of what you do. But the moment when Kermit sings “Rainbow Connection” in that movie on stage, and the audience is out there. There was no real audience, but there were crew and all the puppeteers and all these various people and visitors who come in that day.
And I just wanted to do a rehearsal because I was singing it live, which is rare. We usually would pre-record. And so you know the guys are lighting, and we do that, so I said, can we just run it once as a rehearsal? So I put on the puppet, and I’m back there. Nobody else is around. It’s just Kermit. And they played the music, and I sung the song. And at the end, the people who were there just applauded and went crazy. And it was a relatively small group. But these were the film people. This was not like fans. I mean, they were fans, but they were the people working on the film. So that was very gratifying to me.
You’re showing Muppet Treasure Island this weekend. Can you talk about that experience of getting to work with Tim Curry and getting to adapt such an awesome novel?
Yeah. Well, I, you know, one of the things we used to sit around and play with that we never did all of them was that you could catch the Muppets in so many stories. You know, and it was always a fun, silly thing to do. And those two films (The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island), I think, were really perfect for our little group of characters.
And I was a massive fan of Tim Curry’s long before that. So I had the chance to work with him. He and I, we have dressing rooms, you know, doing this thing. Upstairs, away from the studio. And there’s all these long time-outs while they’re lighting and setting things up. His was next to mine, so our doors were always open. He’d come over and sit with me. We’d talk and just hang out. Got to know each other a little bit, you know. So it was great.
Okay, so you said that you would cast Muppets in these kinds of stories. One of my favorite questions the internet always runs around is, what movie would you love to see the Muppets in with one human? Do you have an answer to that?
Who was I talking to the other day? Something came up that was going to be the movie. And I said the next time somebody asked me that question, I’m going to remember, and now it’s totally gone! I always joke that it should be Heat!
“The Action is the juice”
Yeah! Yeah! Kermit should be Al Pacino. It’s just silly!
