Mike Darnell: “Simon Cowell Learned To Be A Mean Judge For Fox — Underneath He’s Different”
deadline.comSimon Cowell wasn’t always the mean judge character he played on American Idol. Mike Darnell, who shepherded Fox’s run at the top of U.S.
reality game during the first decade of the 2000s, revealed Cowell is not like the grumpy, unimpressed persona he adopted for American Idol and brought to The X Factor and his other reality shows.
Recalling when Idol was in development, Darnell said he had instructed Cowell to “walk into a room and actually verbally tell someone, ‘you’re out’,” but that the initial feeling after trying it out was that the character was “too harsh.” Darnell had first noticed Cowell’s frankness during a small audition taping in Hollywood and was keen to lean into a different kind of reality TV judge, as the trend at that time was for nicer, more supportive critiques.
Cowell was already adopting a frank tone on the British version, Pop Idol, which ran on ITV between 2001 and 2003. “I knew we had to get Simon Cowell as he was the star of the show but we needed something different in the U.S. — the mean judge, the frank judge.
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