Interview with Kirstie Alley - Time Crashers

16 August 2015

Why did you agree to do this show?

I wanted to get involved in it because we had just had a death in our family and the person that passed away was a risk taker and a daredevil. I wanted to carry on his legacy. I also felt that I had become a little less adventurous in my life, taking the same kind of roles, and I just thought I needed to do something adventurous. I didn’t know I was going to be a servant all the time, I thought I was going to be Maid Marian, how wrong was I?!

 

What was your biggest concern going into the show?

I had no concerns going into the show because they told me I was going to live in different moments of history, it would be authentic and I’ll be living the way they did and eating what they did. The missing element in that was that I was always going to be a low ranking servant... If they had said to me when they approached me that I would go into all these periods of history and I was always going to be a frickin' servant, I would have said, ‘No way!’

 

As the only American, what did you make of the other celebrities?

I thought everybody there was great. I didn’t think there were any bad seeds or extreme weirdos. There wasn’t anyone who was combative or weird, and I was thankful for that because I didn’t want to be on a reality show where we are voted off. I loved the camaraderie with everyone.

 

Which celebrity did you bond with the most?

I think when you are working with someone side by side then you instantly bond with that person, so Fern and I got on great, so did Meg and I. I loved Jermaine and Keith. He was amazing; an absolute riot. Keith was doing Shakespeare the whole time. When I first got approached to do this I asked whether I had to act but they said I just had to be myself. What I hated about listening to myself though is the accent. Every time I opened my mouth I was like, ‘Shut up, you’re bastardising the English language!’ You hear all these beautiful English voices and then you hear me and it’s like a frog from Kansas, it was like, ‘What the hell?’ I didn’t want to attempt a British accent, which would have been hideous, so it was weird to hear myself say words that sounded beautiful coming out of their mouths.

 

What did you think about the outfits you had to wear?

Mostly they were totally ridiculous! We were fishwives in the Victorian era and it was freezing outside. There was water blowing on us and we were sat there gutting fish in these stupid outfits. We were stuck in skirts with loads of layers, so I was like, ‘Great, we’ll stand over here in our stupid dresses and die!’

 

What was the hardest thing for you during this experience?

The cold - that’s what made me the most agitated. When I am cold, I’m a stone cold bitch! I can’t function when I am cold. I absolutely hate being cold – that made me crazy!

 

Did you have to do anything disgusting?

Every day was disgusting and gross! In the Elizabethan era I had to help to skin the head of a dead boar. That was pretty gross. We had to prepare a big opulent feast for the rich people.  Their view on life was so all about them that they thought nothing of going out and slaughtering 50 different exotic animals to show off. So we had to hook body parts from a goose onto a dead baby pig, the rich people at the time thought that kind of thing was hysterical, I just thought it was disgusting. It was pretty gross though, I’ve never seen anything like it. Throughout all the crashes we were given all these dead animals, but of course the knives were never sharp enough so at one point I was literally ripping a chicken apart with my hands.

 

How did you cope being bossed around in every era?

I really didn’t cope very well. If I really was a servant in any of those eras I totally would have just run off to the nearest town and become a barmaid or a hooker. I kept saying, ‘I would not do this, I would go to town and be a hooker’. In most cases when you were a servant to someone you weren’t allowed to be married and you really were the lowest of the low. You had no time to be at home or have a family; you just existed to serve these rich people. That’s ridiculous! I just thought that I would have rather risked it out there as a hooker and at least been in control of my own life.

 

Were you shocked at how badly the servants were treated?

I was really shocked at how badly the servants were treated. They call them servants but really they were just slaves, I don’t do well with slavery. Being an American, there’s not a distinct class structure over here as there was in those periods. We’re born and bred to know that no matter where you came from or what family you were born into, you can make it out of that and you can be a success. But in England, you couldn’t move into the upper classes, it was a lottery at birth. Your lot in life was to just be, and always remain, a servant, which is what led me to believe that if I was really in those times I would have tried my luck at being an entrepreneur in the sex trade!

 

What was your favourite moment?

I loved being a medieval squire the most. We were out in the countryside, there was bonfires going everywhere so we were never freezing, and we were around horses all the time, which I loved. I got to groom the horses and I liked the common bond we all had as we helped our knights ahead of the jousting competition. We were men because women didn’t get to do those kinds of jobs in medieval times. Hands down I would have rather been a man in those times than a woman because we all know what the women were doing - cooking and scrubbing! I think I made a great man, also with the squires, which I loved, was that their goal was to one day be a knight. I liked that they could move up the ranks if they did their job really well.

 

What did you learn from the experience?

I think the biggest appreciation I had walking away from that experience is how strong humans are, and how even in the most adverse conditions, they will survive. That said, they have to survive in a group, you can’t be an individual thinking you can do it all by yourself because you can’t. We do actually really need each other. I liked the delegation side of it as well, you know, being given a task and just getting it done. It made me much more organised in my own life. I also learned a lot about gender, if people think men and women were treated alike throughout British history then they are very wrong. It made me appreciate how well we’ve got it as women now, and how well we’ve all got it in general... I think women have come a long way but still there’s a way to go. I mean, women are still being paid less than men and that’s happening in America as well as Britain.

 

Would you do it again?

Hell no! Well maybe if we could Time Crash into periods where I could be royalty all the time, that probably wouldn’t be fun to watch but it would be fun for me.

 
What did you do when you left?

The first thing I did was stay in this really fancy hotel and I just laid in the bath. I think I took four baths one after the other. I would scrub myself down, empty the bath and then fill it up again because I was determined to wash all the grubbiness away! I then stayed with Meg for a week afterwards and she just raved about the show, she would go back and do it again, and I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ But every time we went out and ordered something to eat we would be like, ‘Oh my god!’ We felt so lucky that we got to just place an order and then someone brought us our food.