Search icon

Movies & TV

13th Nov 2022

WATCH: Tim Allen reveals hilarious confusion kids have when they see him in public

Rory Cashin

The Santa Clause and Toy Story star doesn’t always have great interactions with his younger fans.

Depending on what generation you’re from, Tim Allen will be recognisable to you from different projects.

It could be his hit sit-com Home Improvement, which ran from 1991 to 1999.

Maybe it is from his incredible big screen sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest, or from voicing Buzz Lightyear in the four Toy Story movies.

But if you’ve got any younger family members that you spend any amount of time with around Christmas, this he is likely still very much a part of your life thanks to The Santa Clause movies.

That trilogy, the last of which hit cinemas in 2006, remain hugely popular with kids these days, which is likely why Disney+ have decided to tap back into that audience, with the imminent arrival of the new series The Santa Clauses.

In the run-up to the release of the new Christmassy show, JOE had the chance to chat with Tim Allen himself, and you can check out that interview in full right here:

‘That ugly man ate Buzz Lightyear!’

Over the course of the conversation, Tim Allen reveals his favourite Christmas movie of all time, and why he thinks the return for The Santa Clauses will prove to be particularly important in this new season.

But when we asked if he has ever been “spotted” by kids as being the actual Santa Claus while out and about, Allen gave the following hilarious response:

“It’s a yearly thing. So every year, about this time of year, it starts coming up. And so I get parents who do two different things sometimes, totally related.

“They’ll say ‘This is Santa Claus’, and the kid will look at me and they’ll kind of remember Scott Calvin when he’s not Santa Claus. And then I have to kind of explain, because I look at the parent, ‘Good going, you dropped the dime on me’, and I gotta tell these kids, when I’m in a supermarket, ‘I’m here to eat a lot of food, and I’ll get big by Christmas’.

“And the kid goes ‘I get it’. It’s the same when randomly people will say ‘This is Buzz Lightyear’, and then it’ll be a kid that goes ‘No he’s not’, and then I’ll talk… I’ve had one kid burst into tears and he said ‘That ugly man ate Buzz Lightyear’. And I said ‘Okay, no, no, that’s not…’, so sometimes it’s not a good idea.”

Something to keep in mind should you ever see Tim Allen out in the wild.

The first two episodes of The Santa Clauses arrive on Disney+ on Wednesday, 16 November.