No, Tim Key doesn’t know why he’s dressed as a pigeon either. In Mickey 17, triple-Oscar-winner Bong Joon-ho’s recent sci-fi blockbuster, the comedian plays a man desperate to join a mission to colonise the ice planet Niflheim. The next thing he knows, he’s on the spaceship – inexplicably trussed up in a luxuriant pigeon suit and acting as the expedition leader’s lackey. Can Key shed any light on this turn of events?
“No I can’t,” he says, decisively. He enquired about his character’s outfit during his first meeting with Bong. “And he laughed and didn’t answer.” On set, Key says he “shuffled over in my costume” and asked again. “And he laughed again.” At the premiere, the Parasite director gave Key “a big hug, and then I said: ‘Just going back to this pigeon thing … ’ and he laughed again. I don’t think I’m going to ask him any more.”
Despite not being privy to even the most basic information about his character, Key certainly made Pigeon Man his own. It’s difficult to describe his performance in the film, which stars Robert Pattinson, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo, as anything other than very Tim Key-y: it’s the velocity of his sentences, the raising of the eyebrows, the combination of boyish eccentricity, melting desperation and a tendency, when pushed, towards bone-dry belligerence. This singular mode is the common denominator in the 48-year-old’s sprawling CV: present in everything from his criminally underrated sketch show Cowards to his Edinburgh award-winning live act to his pitch-perfect stint as Alan Partridge’s Sidekick Simon.
