Speaking with Yahoo Entertainment from his Arizona home to promote his new podcast Alice Cooper’s Vintage Vault, which features classic conversations from his long-running radio show, Alice Cooper grants an epic interview worthy of its own podcast episode. The man is such a rock icon that even his legendary pet snakes — who’ve gone by such marquee-worthy stage names as Cobra Winfrey and Julius Squeezer — have rock ‘n’ roll tales to tell.
“There are so many great stories when you’re carrying snakes around, the big boa constrictors, because they were so much a part of the band that you just let them roam around,” Cooper chuckles. “But they’d get loose in hotels. We had one go down the toilet in Knoxville, Tenn., and it came up in Charley Pride’s toilet about two weeks later. … Yvonne, she was our biggest snake and the sweetest, she was the nicest one, but if you’re sitting on the toilet and a snake comes up between your legs while you’re sitting there… Well, you’re going to have some kind of traumatic reaction to that!”
A couple of Cooper’s snakes, Kachina (his first snake, as seen on the Killer album cover) and Eva Marie Snake, actually became movie stars, appearing in the famous “I hate snakes!” scene in the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark. But Cooper is no stranger to the screen himself, having acted in everything from the notorious movie musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Wayne’s World to television shows with the Muppets and Gene Wilder. But who would play him in a Cooper biopic? He readily suggests his bandmate in the supergroup Hollywood Vampires and his onetime co-star in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows.
“If Johnny Depp were just better-looking, he could play me,” Cooper quips. “He would be so good for it, though. … because he really likes to take those characters that nobody else wants to play. And he loves prosthetics. He would get my nose in there and the whole thing. And he knows me well enough now where he could imitate me pretty well.”
This article was originally published on yahoo.com/entertainment/.
