‘Red Nose Day’ Creator and Jack Black on the Comedian’s Charitable Trip to Uganda
5/19/2015
For nearly thirty years Richard Curtis has devoted a great deal of time and energy to a cause that he firmly believes in, and yet, sadly, many in the United States are not fully aware of it. But that’s about to change.
Thursday night NBC will air a special highlighting Red Nose Day, a movement that Curtis has spearheaded in the United Kingdom since the ‘80s, that’s raised over a billion dollars for charities around the world.
The annual event is the U.K.’s #1 television fundraising event. The U.S. version will feature some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Julia Roberts, Will Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Jodie Foster and more. The special will feature videos produced by Funny or Die and incredible music performances, all to raise funds to benefit 12 charitable organizations that work to lift children and young people out of poverty, in the U.S. and throughout the world.
Curtis is most well-known as the writer of several romantic comedies, including Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the writer and director of Love Actually. He admits that the evolution of Red Nose Day actually started with an impromptu offer that he made during a dinner party years ago. “It’s really just such a weird story,” laughs Curtis. “At that gathering, I met a girl who was going to Africa with a charity that I knew of and I just offered to go with her. The charity thought it was kind of a waste to send both of us to the same country, so they sent her to the Sudan and me to Ethiopia. While I was there, this is the only way to say it, I saw some terrible things. Things like this building that was three corrugated huts right together – one for people who were going to die that day, one for people who might make it through the night, and one for people who might survive the week. I came back from that trip determined to use the resources that I had in the comedy community to do a stage show, which we did rather successfully. Off of that everyone involved said, ‘let’s do a TV show to reach more people,’ so that’s how we ended up here.”
Read more at http://observer.com/2015/05/red-nose-day-creator-and-jack-black-on-the-comedians-charitable-trip-to-uganda/#ixzz3apJrveXc
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