The post Aaron Tracy Talks New Roald Dahl Podcast Produced By Ron Howard appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Quentin Blake cover art for Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie The post Aaron Tracy Talks New Roald Dahl Podcast Produced By Ron Howard appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Quentin Blake cover art for Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie

Aaron Tracy Talks New Roald Dahl Podcast Produced By Ron Howard

Quentin Blake cover art for Roald Dahl’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’

Courtesy of Puffin

As something of a hypochondriac child, I spent a lot of time out of class, sitting in the main office of my Orthodox Jewish day school and reading books pilfered from the library a floor above (don’t worry, I brought most of them back).

One of my favorite authors in those days of semi-truancy was Roald Dahl, whose extraordinary imagined worlds became the perfect distraction from ailments—both real and imagined. What I did not realize until much later was the ultimate irony of a Jewish kid reading titles like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, and Matilda.

Dahl, as it transpired, was a vocal antisemite who even went so far as to justify the mindset and actions of Adolf Hitler in a 1983 interview.

While Dahl’s family later apologized on his behalf, the knowledge that one of my favorite writers, a man who had inspired me to pursue my own literary voice, would have hated me was a little gut-wrenching. How could a person behind some of the most iconic children’s stories full of universal themes and morals be capable of such bigotry?

Such cognitive dissonance made me wonder what else I didn’t know about the man who gave the world Willy Wonka’s scrumdiddlyumptious candy operation and a giant, floating peach full of talking creepy-crawlies.

Turns out Dahl’s notorious dislike of Jews was but one layer of an individual who “contained multitudes,” to quote Aaron Tracy, creator and host The Secret World Of Roald Dahl. Produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment (via their audio deal with iHeart Media), the podcast—whose first episode is now streaming on all major platforms—documents Dahl’s larger-than-life existence.

From operating as a charismatic British spy in the United States during the Second World War to his troubled career as a Hollywood screenwriter, it’s safe to say that Dahl lived what Tracy (an established screenwriter and professor at Yale University) likes to describe as “one of the noisiest lives of the 20th century.”

The podcast—which is as biographical as it is critical of its titular figure—ended up being quite the personal journey for Tracy, whose own identity as a Jew forced him to confront the paradoxical nature of Roald Dahl.

Forbes Entertainment has the very first interview with the creator since Deadline first broke news of the podcast, Jan. 16.

Aaron Tracy dives into his podcast about life of Roald Dahl

Josh Weiss: How did the podcast originally come together?

Aaron Tracy: I have two little kids, I’ve been reading to them a lot, and I started to think about the books that I read as a kid. For me, that was all about Dahl. I realized that I knew nothing about the man’s life, so I started looking into him and was totally floored. It seems to me that he really did live one of the noisiest lives of his century. What I was most struck by was his 20s, when he was a businessman for Shell Oil, then a fighter pilot in World War II, then a spy for MI6 (seducing the wives of powerful Americans), then a screenwriter chasing Hollywood glory, then this writer of muscular adult fiction like his hero, Hemingway.

It felt like he was trying on all these different masks and trying to figure out, as I say in the podcast, not only what kind of man he was, but what it even meant to be a man at his point in the century. Today, young men are grappling with the exact same questions, and we’ve labeled it a crisis of masculinity. For Dahl, it wasn’t until this series of really devastating tragedies in his family that forced him to rethink everything. He finally turned to children’s literature and found his true voice. He was 45 when he did that, which is so much later than most people probably assume.

Weiss: How did you get Imagine Entertainment on board as producer?

Tracy: Whenever I make a podcast, I look for who would be the best partner and with Imagine, I don’t think there’s anyone that does better true stories than Imagine. I love A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, Eight Mile, and especially Frost/Nixon. It felt like Frost/Nixon had a lot in common with what I was doing. My project about Roald Dahl and their project about Nixon are both very much about these complicated men with a lot of demons. It felt like it would be a good fit, so I asked my agents at UTA to send my pitch over to them, and I was very excited that they wanted to do it.

L-R: Key art for Aaron Tracy’s Roald Dahl podcast; a headshot of Tracy

Courtesy of iHeart Media/Imagine Entertainment & Aaron Tracy

Weiss: What was the research process like?

Tracy: It was extensive. I’ve got on my shelf here 11 different books about him. There’s no shortage of material about Dahl, including two memoirs that he wrote himself and one authorized biography. [Plus] lots and lots of magazine and newspaper articles online. There’s also tons of interviews that he did, especially in the last 15 years of his life, that you can find on YouTube. It was [about] digging through everything. A lot of it was contradictory, so it was trying to figure out exactly what the truth was.

Weiss: What was an example of something that was contradictory in the research?

Tracy: Dahl was always a bit of a fabulist, not surprisingly, and oftentimes in interviews, he would make some of his past experiences sound a little bit more exciting than they actually were. For instance, an event that changed his life was when he was shot down over the Libyan desert, when he was flying for the RAF during World War II. When he gave interviews and wrote about it, he talked about how the bottom of his plane hit a boulder, crashed, and he was all alone out of the middle of the desert. I found other sources that have said, “Actually, he didn’t hit a boulder. He ran out of gas, having made a mistake. And he wasn’t alone, but, in fact, he had a wingman, and there was someone else with him in the desert.’ It’s about figuring out how much of this is Dahl just trying have a little bit of self-aggrandizement to make himself seem a little bit more heroic than he actually was. He’s just a very good storyteller, and the story is a little bit better when it’s more harrowing.

Weiss: Is there anything that surprised you most during the research process?

Tracy: I was really surprised by how much failure there was, especially when he was in Hollywood. He really struggled to get a movie made. I’m also a screenwriter and know how hard it is, but I guess when I think of someone like Dahl—who sold 300 million copies of his books—I think that he must have always been a successful writer. But, in fact, when he was in his 20s and 30s, it was failure after failure after failure. He worked on a big project with Walt Disney [The Gremlins], which Walt Disney put a lot of money into. Walt Disney was even putting out commercials for the project before the screenplay was even finished, but Dahl didn’t mesh with the way that Disney liked to run a writers’ room, and Disney scrapped the project.

Dahl later worked with Robert Altman, and that project went pretty far. It was a screenplay called, Death, Where is Thy Sting-a-ling-ling?, which is a absolutely bananas title. But it went so far as to have a lead actor cast, Gregory Peck, and filming began. Dahl was excited. Finally, after so many years of trying, he was going to get one of his screenplays made. Then the head of the studio saw the dailies and decided to shut the movie down a couple weeks into production. I talk about this in the podcast, but it really felt like Dahl was on his way to becoming someone like F. Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner in Hollywood in Hollywood. These extraordinary writers who went to Hollywood and failed and failed and failed—oftentimes becoming alcoholics and shells of their former selves.

Cover for Roald Dahl’s ‘The Gremlins.’

Courtesy of Dark Horse Publishing

Weiss: With a life as colorful as his, I’m surprised we haven’t seen a Roald Dahl biopic made yet. Why haven’t we seen more about him in pop culture?

Tracy: I think it’s a few things. One, it’s really hard to make a movie about a writer. There’s so few of them. The ones that actually get made are among my favorites. Charlie Kaufman, of course, made Adaptation. There’s Shakespeare in Love, but those are really few and far between. The life of a writer is usually so much more sedentary. It’s usually lacking drama and so, I think that makes it a hard sell. Over the past, 15 years, I think there’s been a bit of a reconsidering Dahl. I don’t think he’s canceled in any way. I mean, Netflix paid $1 billion for the rights to his estate to adapt his stories just a few years ago, and some of our greatest filmmakers and actors are working on projects based on his stories. But I do think that both of those reasons contribute to it being very difficult to make a big Hollywood movie that turns him into a hero.

Weiss: You mention in the podcast that you didn’t want to follow a traditional story structure while documenting Dahl’s life. Can you talk about that?

Tracy: I didn’t want to do a cradle to the grave. I knew that would just bore me and bore listeners. I wanted to start with what got me so excited about the project, which was Dahl’s days as a spy for MI6. I really make that the first episode, getting into The Irregulars and this incredible James Bond-ian life that Dahl lived. After that, I wanted to get into another really exciting chapter of his life, which was when he was a fighter pilot. And so, I keep reminding the reader where we are in the chronology of Dahl’s life, but I really do think that getting into the most climactic, most dramatic aspects of his life is going to make it a much more interesting lesson than if I started off with him as a child, all the tragedy he experienced in Buckinghamshire, and ending with him as an old man. But we do hear all of that. We just don’t hear it in the order you might expect.

Weiss: Any conversation regarding Dahl almost always includes a reference to his anti-Semitism. What did you discover on that front?

Tracy: There’s no question that he was antisemitic. He himself said, ‘I’ve become antisemitic in a 1990 interview [with The Independent]. It’s a very personal issue for me and something I really wanted to dig into. This is not at all to to let Dahl off the hook, but I did want to understand where this was all coming from, because this was a guy who spent his 20s fighting Nazis, being really brave and and working on the Allied side to defeat fascism. And then, later in life, he ended up adopting many of the ideologies of the Nazis. The most famous antisemitic interview that Dahl ever gave was this 1983 interview he gave to the New Statesman, where he said what’s now become his infamous line: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity—even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

Now, at this time in Dahl’s life, he was divorced from his wife of decades. He was having a lot of trouble with that. He was in a tremendous amount of physical pain from all the surgeries that he had had on his back from his crashes during the war. He had experienced several horrifying personal tragedies regarding his family and although he was an incredibly successful children’s author, it wasn’t what he wanted for his life. He wanted to be a great adult author like Hemingway. I think all of those factors contributed to him giving that interview and the frustration that that clearly came from. But for me, it’s pretty inexcusable and certainly made me think about whether or not I’m going to be able to share his work with my kids.

Weiss: There’s no simple answer to this, but how does one reconcile these wonderful stories he wrote with his notorious bigotry?

Tracy: On the podcast, especially in our last few episodes, I bring on a few people much smarter than I am on this topic to debate and discuss it with me. We bring on Yair Rosenberg from The Atlantic, who’s an expert in all things relating to antisemitism. I bring on Roxanne Gay, the brilliant cultural critic, as well as Claire Dederer, who wrote a fantastic book on this subject. All of them had somewhat different opinions about this. Roxanne Gay is very clear about it, she has no interest in reading someone like Roald Dahl or listening to Kanye West’s music. She thinks that there are too many other geniuses who aren’t problematic that you can simply turn to. But it’s something for everyone to decide for themselves, especially when the artist, in this case, Roald Dahl, has passed away and is not gaining financially from us buying his books. It’s just about whether or not people feel comfortable.

For me, it’s going to be about when my kids are old enough that I can have a conversation with them about it. For whatever reason, I don’t have too much trouble. I am able to watch the films made by some men who have turned out to be monsters. With Roald Dahl, it feels different because it’s not me making the decision, it’s my impressionable children whom it’s being forced upon. They’re so young that books aren’t just entertainment for them. Books are going to shape their worldview. And so, I think I’m going to wait until they’re old enough that I can have a real conversation with them about our need to separate the art from the artist, and about exactly who Roald Dahl was before I’m able to share his stuff with them.

The bestselling children’s writer Roald Dahl (1916-1990) whose stories include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, 1971. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Corbis via Getty Images

Weiss: Which of Dahl’s famous works is most emblematic of the man himself?

Tracy: One of the things that complicates your previous question about the problematic nature of Dahl is that I don’t really see the antisemitism in the work. Some people say that The Witches contains antisemitic tropes. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, and it does make me think a little bit differently about this issue. If there was antisemitism or bigotry on the page, I would have a much different answer … I think Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is probably my favorite, as it is many people’s favorite. It’s by no means autobiographical, but there are a lot of autobiographical elements in it to Dahl’s life, once you know about it. That one probably feels the closest to the Dahl that I’ve come to know over this year of researching him.

Weiss: What would you say to people who think they know everything about Roald Dahl before listening to the podcast?

Tracy: I would say you may think you know who he is, but you’re wrong. This is a guy who contained multitudes. He lived one of the noisiest lives of the 20th century. I really think that’s true. You might know he was a spy for MI6, but I would bet you don’t know exactly what he did as a spy, how close he got with the Roosevelts; that his job was to seduce the wives of powerful Americans who weren’t yet on the Allied side, and that he was really good at that. There’s just so much to his life, not to mention the really fascinating chapter [about his time] in Hollywood. He keeps striking me as the Zelig figure who was able to blend in to all of these different worlds—from the business world, to the world of combat, to the world of espionage to, the world of sophistication and urbanity. Unless you’ve done a really deep dive, I would bet there’s a lot about Roald Dahl’s life that will surprise you.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshweiss/2026/01/19/from-espionage-to-willy-wonka-aaron-tracy-on-tackling-the-paradoxical-roald-dahl-in-new-podcast-produced-by-ron-howard/

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