Tape Face on America's Got Talent, Trump and more

It's been a funny old year for duct-taped mime Sam Wills, aka Tape Face, who made it to the finals of America's Got Talent 2016. He breaks his silence to chat to us about Cowell, Trump, and a certain skit involving oven gloves... 

"Is oven gloves my Stairway to Heaven?" Sam Wills ponders. The man behind the tape of ‘Tape Face’, his mute alter ego, is having a slight existential crisis. "When the gloves come out now there’s a reaction. It’s a funny one and I’m very much torn at the moment, because I’ve got a re-edit of that joke that I can do, but also the audience at these shows now are coming because of these fucking gloves." He is of course talking about the video that recently went viral of Tape Face on America’s Got Talent, using oven gloves to sing a love ballad to one another. It has brought him fame and thusly some expectation, but from Wills’ cheery New Zealand lilt you feel that this is the kind of problem he lives for.

You might have noticed the more-than-slight geographical incongruence in that last sentence. Although Wills lives in London and was born in New Zealand, he just finished near the top of America’s biggest talent show. "Some people flagged it on social media but you just have to be eligible as a performer," he says. "It’s a light entertainment variety show, not like I was running for President."

As lamentable as such shows are within the entertainment industry, the Kiwi does seem to have pulled a fast one on Simon Cowell and his chums. "It’s such a dreaded word and it’s thrown around so much in the comedy industry – 'Oh, this’ll be good exposure' – and so much of the time it’s bullshit," Wills says. "I set my goals very clearly. I just wanted to get some exposure and reach the top ten." And reach the top ten he did, becoming a viral internet sensation along the way. "It was an opportunity to use this TV show, just as much as they’re using me. I knew I was making good television. I knew I was going to be the odd character."

Wills was keen to keep his interactions to a minimum and decided early on that he was going to keep the tape on the entire time, on stage and off – a twofold attack that would create further mystique about this already pretty enigmatic creation, and which also wouldn’t reveal his native New Zealand accent and turn a jingoistic nation against the plucky foreigner. "Maybe it’s the street performer sneaky pirate in me," he says. "I got away with that. There’s a part of me that’s thinking, 'Shit, I think I might have got one over them.' Which is quite nice."

Breaking America with America's Got Talent

Wills landed in London about nine years ago after performing on the streets of his native Christchurch, "and I’m still building my way up," he claims. "I’ve always wanted to go over to the States, do some shows over there. To do that again in America I’d have to move to LA, go to the comedy circuit and rise up through the ranks. That’s gonna take eight years, nine years again and I don’t have time for that." The hustler in Wills couldn’t pass up a surefire way to gather that crowd more quickly – much like he would back when he worked that golden lunchtime hour, trying to get world-weary office workers who'd trudged out for sustenance to pass over their hard-earned cash into his upturned hat. With America's Got Talent, Wills managed to do that and more, attracting a bigger legion of fans and even a verbatim copycat.

"It popped up and I was like, 'That’s it, I’ve made it,'" he reminisces of the time when he saw that his act had been lifted, move for move, by an impersonator on a small Brazilian talent show. Rather than flip out at his intellectual property being so blatantly ripped off, Wills tracked the fellow down via his die-hard fanbase and dropped the young Brazilian ‘Rosto de Fita’ a line: "Hello, my name’s Sam Wills, I think you may have heard of me," he laughs. "I ended up having a really lovely chat with him, he’s a clown who works in Brazil and genuinely he just needed the money, and from that street performer point of view I was just like, yeah, if you need the money you do the show."

This laissez-faire attitude to art and commerce marks Wills apart from most comedians, and indeed most artists. He enjoys what he does and remembers all too well what it is like to be a struggling performer. When trying to get a key spot at the Edinburgh festival or in London his familial group of clowns, acrobats, jugglers and more would gather and divvy up times – "but if you were late, you didn’t get a spot. Didn’t matter who you were." He's still got that down-to-earth ragamuffin sense of mischief and glee that would entertain the people of Covent Garden on their limited breaks, even when performing to a packed house with Mel B as a prop.

The joy of live performance

TV has called in the past, most notably with BBC Three’s pilot The Tape Face Tapes, and there will no doubt be offers from further afield after Wills' impressive turn on the world’s most famous talent show. But it will always be live performance that drives him. "I’m always going to be about live performing," he says. "Comedy needs to be seen live. You can film whatever you want and it goes out to a million people, but you go and perform in a room to 200 people that have paid for a ticket and want to see the show – that’s incredible."

The feeling of performing live can’t be captured in a viral video, he suggests. "For me I’m always creating material that I want to perform live. So all the stuff that goes out on TV or whatever is just an advert to come and see the live show."

Live comedy is what Wills does best, amazing onlookers with household items. Folk may come to see the oven glove routine but they stay glued for all the rest – and then they come back to show their friends what this man can do with staplers, a tape measure and myriad other mundane items. The beauty of a silent comedian is the timelessness – and because he isn’t speaking, he’s not having to make mention of whatever depressing disasters might be unfolding right outside the bubble of a Tape Face performance. "It’s a complete break from reality," Wills says. "And for me that’s one of the most therapeutic parts of my show, is that there're no current events. You know, Donald Trump doesn’t exist in my show. It’s quite nice. Whereas a comedian who has to go out there and talk about the current state of the world... Christ, you’d wanna kill yourself afterwards."

By sealing up his mouth and opening the minds of his spectators, Tape Face is able to keep his sanity and provide a very welcome respite from the Armageddon that's developing in the same country where he just wandered into the top ten of a variety show. "I’m trying to remind adults what it is to just remember that feeling of being a kid," he says. "It’s important to look at things in a different way and remember to switch off and play."

At a time when the older generation seems to be consistently punishing younger ones, this may be the most sage advice you can get from a man who doesn’t speak.