Keegan-Michael Key on 'Wonka', Hugh Grant's Oompa-Loompa and the Anatomy of a Good Joke

“It's, it's, it's, um... It's… uh. What's the word?”

Keegan-Michael Key tries again. “It's, it's, it's, it's terrific. Because it's both terrific… It's terrify...” He’s found it now. “It's, like, terrifying, yet it's, it's…” Nope, gone again.

Quite what feeling grips you when you first see Hugh Grant’s Oompa-Loompa in Paul King’s Wonka, the musical prequel to the 1971 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, takes some drilling down. But Key, who was one half of the funniest comedy double-act of the last 20 years with Jordan Peele, likes getting into details, winkling out the tiniest nuggets of funny he can find.

Take his character in Wonka, starring Timothée Chalamet as a particularly elfin, wide-eyed incarnation of the chocolate industrialist before he became a reclusive Howard Hughes type. This Wonka is a particularly sweet creation, trying to make his way in the big city and his mum proud.

Key plays a chief of police called Chief of Police. He’s a daft, broad supporting character. He has a great big moustache, a great big Noo Yoik accent you might recall from a couple of Key & Peele sketches, and a great big fat suit which gets bigger as his addiction to chocolate gets out of control. He’s the man keeping Wonka down, in the pay of the Big Choc forces running the city. King’s instructions were fairly straightforward.

“Paul said, I just want him to sound like a cop, I want him to sound like a cop,” Key says, pouring himself black tea in a London hotel room and trying to shake off the red-eye flight that got him here. He’s a gently intense presence, eyes alternately wide and engaging or crinkled in a chuckle. “Not a police officer: a cop.”

Key went a bit deeper though. “What was really important for me to hook in was that there's this kind of toughness to the way he speaks, but really what's going on is that he knows that he’s a flawed man. He's got some issues, you know? He knows that he's got an addiction problem, and he tries to hide it, and he's trying to fight it and he just can't help himself.”

Saying yes to King was a formality, “knowing that I'm going to be working with this guy, who actually, I think is a genius”. Key has been a fan since long before King had done the Paddington films, and was directing the more esoteric end of British sitcoms in the noughties.

“You think about The Mighty Boosh,” Key says. “There's still something super magical about that work, as there is with Paddington, as there is with Wonka.”

Roald Dahl’s stories were a constant at school, and he remembers being deeply and lastingly amazed-slash-freaked-out by the image of Violet Beauregard gradually turning into a gigantic blueberry. “And I think some of that has to do with the fact that Roald Dahl has this undying respect for children. His material leans toward the dark. And because he does that, he's showing children that he thinks that they can handle it.”

On the Wonka promo tour last week

Beyond the Grant-a Loompa, and the chocolates that make you fly, and the whimsical pan-European world that Wonka swirls together, it was the feeling that Paul King was whittling a fine-tuned comedy machine which drew him in. “He has this really great cause and effect feel about his work, where one thing leads to another, this happens, therefore that happens, but this happens, therefore that happens. It has that wonderful drive to it, or engine to it. And, uh, I wanted to be part of that engine. I wanted to be on that engine.” He snaps out of serious mode. “Toot toot!”

When Key’s telling an anecdote he revises it in real time, shuffling and spinning fragments of sentences around until they fit. He’s explored the cross-section of musicals and comedy already in Schmigadoon!, but his singing skills were a relatively recent revelation.

“My, my, my, my wife was like, you're going to sing – I want you to sing a song during the wedding. And I remember singing, I sang, uh, ‘Tennessee Whiskey’ by Chris Stapleton. ‘Cause that's our, that's our song. And, and then my agents were at the wedding, at the wedding party, and they were just going, What the hell was... When were you going to tell us you could do this? You know what I mean? And that was the beginning of it all.”

Key is a comedy enthusiast and, lately, a comedy historian: he’s the author of a podcast and book about the history of sketch comedy, co-written with his wife Elle. The musical numbers in Wonka, written with gleeful wordiness by the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon, are exactly the kind of fiddly, layered bits he’s really into.

We talk about ‘Sweet Tooth’, the song in which his Chief of Police is lured into corruption by a cabal of Wonka’s rival chocolatiers: it’s full of gags, twists and little grace notes. “That's something that you can do in music that you don't really get to do in a scene, unless that scene is highly rhythmic, which we see a lot in theatre, but not always a lot in cinema.”

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You can prise those moments open in a way it’s harder to do with a straight-up comedy script: there’s the usual back-and-forth, but in ‘Sweet Tooth’ the gags and the movement and the gallop of the music twist each other in different directions. “And there are these little jokes, these little pearls you can drop in the middle of the music if you get the timing right.”

Then there’s what Key refers to as ‘heavy game’, the kind of gags which are real gags; your knock-knock jokes, your my-dog’s-got-no-nose, your three-men-walk-into-a-bar (ouch). The pleasure there is in repetition, and dropping it in just when you’ve forgotten about it. “There’s a nice piece of heavy game in the scene that leads up to ‘Sweet Tooth’. There is what I call the poor gag, or the poor game, which is anytime you mention the word ‘poor’ then Mathew Baynton's character gets sick.”

Baynton does do a very good fake sick. “A very good fake sick. A very good fake sick. And that's a good game. It's a good game that threads throughout the film.” Key grins. “That's a great gag. I love that gag.”

Baynton is one of a raft of British comics cast in Wonka: Matt Lucas, Ellie White, Phil Wang, Rowan Atkinson, Tom Davis, Charlotte Ritchie and more turn up. When Key was watching the Boosh’s Old Gregg drinking Baileys from a shoe, the division between American and British comedy instincts felt more clearly drawn.

“I do think there is a different take. I think sometimes there's a more technical take. There would be moments where I might hear Paul talking to Paterson [Joseph, who plays evil chocolatier Slugworth] about something and saying, go slower here, or speed this up here, and he'd speak about that as much as he would speak about the motivation for a character. Whereas I think in America, very often what we're talking about is the motivation of it.”

He sits back on his chair. “But it is dissolving. It's all kind of dissolving into this big, worldwide pot, if you will.”

Olivia Colman came from that British comedy era King did, and plays the gruesome Mrs Scrubbitt. “She is just savouring the dialect that she happens to be using, that particular type of Cockney,” says Key. “But because she's such a fine actor, that, at the end of the day, is what makes it work. She's one of those actors who doesn't wink at the camera.”

And, finally, he’s worked out that last detail: how he feels about Hugh Grant’s Oompa Loompa. “Terrific and terrible,” he decides. His eyes are wide. “It's-it's-it's mixed together,” he grins. “It's terrific.”