Penguins are funny little creatures, flapping but flightless, surfing waves and chowing down on fish. Most of us only ever get to watch them from a distance at the zoo, or on TV documentaries where their habitats are being snuffed out.
But author Tom Michell is not most of us. In the 1970s, while living in South America, 20-something Michell found himself rescuing a stubborn little Magellanic penguin coated in oil from a beach in Uruguay. He cleaned him up, named him Juan Salvador, and was forced to sneak the little guy across the border and into the British boarding school he was teaching at in Buenos Aires. Now his story is getting the Steve Coogan treatment in The Penguin Lessons, based on Michell’s 2015 memoir of the same name.
“The key difference between Tom’s book and the film is that Steve Coogan’s Tom Michell is twice the age of the young Tom Michell,” says director Peter Cattaneo. “Tom was fairly innocent. A guy in his early 20s who wanted to see Latin America, just got a job over in Buenos Aires in this school, naively going into a civil war situation. Tom Michell, played by Steve Coogan, is older. He’s cynical, he’s running away from life. He’s running away from his feelings. He’s completely disengaged in teaching.”
