Al explained, “Her part in the movie is based on a very small nugget of truth. She actually is the person that suggested that I do ‘Like a Surgeon.’ She was talking to a friend of hers in New York one day and just offhandedly said, ‘I wonder if Weird Al’s gonna do “Like a Surgeon”?’ Her friend knew my managers and word got back to me. And I thought, ‘Hey! Not a bad idea, maybe I will.’ So, we took that little bit of truth and expanded it into this whole kind of psychotic arc where Madonna very calculatedly gets me to do this parody. It takes up the whole rest of the movie.” Ultimately, Weird Al and director Eric Appel felt that Daniel was the best actor to pull off the dramatic and comedic moments. “Eric and I made a shortlist of actors that we thought would be able to pull off the role. And we studied the list and we always kept focusing on Dan’s name because we were both fans of all of Dan’s work, but we knew that he could pull off the dramatic moments and also the comedic moments,” Weird Al said. “Both are very important for this movie because it’s a very specific tone you’re going for. It’s a comedy, obviously, but it needs to be really grounded and needs to be played like some big Oscar-worthy biopic. We literally couldn’t think of anybody in the world that could play the part better than him.”
