McAuley Tucker

I started The McAuley Tucker Show in May of 2020. I was fifteen, the equipment was a laptop, and the plan was to talk to one person who worked in film.

Two years later I interviewed Ron Galella. He was the most famous celebrity photographer alive, he had four million photographs and a permanent place at MoMA, and Marlon Brando had once knocked out five of his teeth. I was seventeen. He died seven days after we spoke, and it turned out to be the last recorded conversation he gave. Today I am a digital director and representative for his estate.

The show is still going, with more than fifty episodes recorded over six years. In that time I have interviewed Brooke Shields, Luke Wilson, Sandra Bernhard, David Zucker and Nicky Hilton. Steve Hickner directed The Prince of Egypt and Bee Movie and had never done a podcast in his life until he did mine. Some of those took a year of asking.

I do the research first, every time, and I do not send questions ahead. The answers people give when they have already written them down are not worth an hour of anybody’s day. I have never paid for an interview.

Everything else comes out of the same place. I have written articles for WORLD Magazine and Reformed Perspective. I direct and cut films, and I have worked on sets carrying C-stands for twelve hours to learn how any of it works. I draw and take photographs. I release records under the name First World Citizen.

Through METT & Co. I look after a small number of estates and artists, which right now means the Galella archive and a record shop in my hometown that has been open since 1987.

I was born in Saskatoon and moved to Woodstock, Ontario, where I still work. I am the second eldest of four and a Christian, which shapes what I ask people and what I leave alone.

My great-uncle Jim ran furnaces, mortgages, restaurants and a pawn shop, and he is the person I have tried hardest to copy. He barely spoke in meetings. He would ask questions for an hour, sum the whole thing up in about a minute at the end, and everybody in the room took his word for it. I am nowhere near that. That is the direction, though.