From Noisey: “Jimmy Buffett on the Role He Was Born to Play: Himself”
We talked to the king parrothead about his role in ‘The Beach Bum,’ working with Snoop Dogg, and why retirement is overrated.
As Jimmy Buffett tells it, he’s got it pretty good. When the musician-turned-business-mogul-turned-sometimes-actor is not touring the world with his band The Coral Reefers, he’s floating on his paddle board in St. Barths or Miami or Sag Harbor, a fishing rod in hand and a mile-wide grin stretched across his face. Buffett knows he’s lucky, but he’s not willing to chalk it all up to good fortune.
“I had enough work ethic instilled in me by my parents,” he explains to Noisey over the phone a few days after the South By Southwest (SXSW) premiere of Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum, where he plays himself. “I also had a slight bit of talent and a little bit of luck. That’s what it takes. It’s mostly perspiration.” 72 years young and 50 years into his career, Buffett is reaping the rewards of a whole lot of sweat. With 27 studio albums under his belt, 17 of which have charted; a Margaritaville empire that includes restaurants, hotels, and margarita machines; and yet another world tour planned for summer 2019, Jimmy Buffett knows what hard work is, though he knows some luck is required too.
And The Beach Bum a happy-go-lucky movie, a symbolic reflection of Buffett’s persona as everyone’s best friend, of a life where chill vibes and good times are paramount. Korine hasn’t explicitly named Buffett as the film’s North Star, but Jimmy is so emblematic of the Florida cool that pervades the film that the two become knottily tangled and inseparable.
Noisey: You’ve done film cameos in the past. How do you decide when you want to hop onto a movie?
Jimmy Buffett: I have friends that make movies. They occasionally ask me. The first one I ever did was a film called Repo Man.
Noisey: The Beach Bum looked like an absolute blast to be around.
Buffett: With Beach Bum, Harmony [Korine] was a good friend of my wife and daughter. He approached me about doing it, mentioning that I’d be doing most of the background music for the thing. I asked him what the role was, and he said, “It’ll be three weeks of shooting,” and I said, “Nope, not me!” I was supposed to have been Snoop’s character, [Lingerie]. That was the original role for me, as the guy that Moondog looks up to. When that didn’t happen, they wrote me into a little scene, and then they got Snoop Dogg. Obviously that worked out better than me [laughs].
Read the full interview at Noisey