Tom Green has spoken out about his decision to leave Hollywood after 20 years.
The 53-year-old Canadian comedian and filmmaker became a popular and controversial figure in the 1990s thanks to his provocative MTV series The Tom Green Show and the cult 2001 film Freddy Got Fingered.
Green also briefly became a tabloid celebrity thanks to his brief marriage to Drew Barrymore the same year.
In an interview with The New York Times to promote his new Amazon Prime film This Is the Tom Green Documentary, Green said: “I’m not really a Hollywood guy. I started to feel like I wasn’t being true to my authentic self.”
The new documentary chronicles his rise to fame and his move from the Hollywood Hills to live on a 150-acre farm in a remote area of Ontario in his home country.
“People are probably going to be surprised that I’m not, like, completely crazy,” Green said of the film, which shows him working with chickens, mules and other animals.
“There’s a sort of a wholesome heartwarming thing to this — that I have a close relationship with my family, that I love animals, that I enjoy doing a lot of things that a great many people in the world enjoy doing, like getting out into the woods,” he added.
The documentary is just one of several projects Green is bringing to Prime Video. Next week he’ll debut a new hour-long stand-up special titled I Got a Mule!, which will be followed a few days later by the four-part reality show Tom Green Country.
Elsewhere in the interview, Green reflects on right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan crediting an appearance on The Tom Green Show with inspiring him to create The Joe Rogan Experience, now the world’s biggest podcast.
“When you had me as a guest, it changed the course of my life,” Rogan told Green on the show last year. “I remember like lightbulbs just going off in my head like, ‘Why don’t I do this?’ The idea came out of you, man.”
“I wasn’t gate-keeping,” Green told The Times. “I was showing everybody exactly how to do it. I’d have comedians up there, and I’d say, ‘Yeah, this is how we do it. We plug this in here.’ I enjoy the fact that all of my friends and comedians that I like could now circumvent the frustrating process of having the only route to being able to express themselves on television was by going through a short list of corporations.”
This Is the Tom Green Documentary is now streaming on Prime Video.
