Interview For weeks, Simone Kleinsma had to keep her lips tight. Now the 65-year-old musical star can finally shout it from the rooftops: she was the Owl in The Masked Singer and emerged as the winner of the RTL council program on Sunday evening. “The first time in that suit was a very claustrophobic experience.”
Was her participation in The Masked Singer a great adventure? “That’s an understatement,” Simone Kleinsma said in conversation with this site on Monday. In the spectacular finale on New Year’s Day, in which she moved with her rendition of Voilà by Barbara Pravi, she defeated the Hippopotamus (Kim-Lian van der Meij) and it became clear that it was Kleinsma who had been pretending to be the Owl all along. on the stage.
The weeks during the recordings were a strange experience, says Kleinsma. “You can’t tell anyone. It’s bizarre that you are taken to a secret location and then have to transfer to a darkened car that takes you to the studio. It seems as if you are engaged in an illegal action, some kind of drug deal,” chuckles Kleinsma, who really enjoyed the program because of all the secrecy.
Admittedly, the first few times in the costume were not very pleasant. “The head of the suit was heavy and I had quite a bit of muscle pain in the first few weeks. I must also say, the first time you put on the suit is a very claustrophobic experience. You really have to get used to it, because you can hardly see anything. Sometimes I had to be helped onto the stage.” Moreover, the disguise was anything but breathable. “It was so hot that sometimes I thought: I’m not going to make it to the end of the song.”
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Simone Kleinsma as the owl with presenter Ruben Nicolai. © RTL
‘I don’t watch the programme’
Saving the end of the songs wasn’t the problem. Kleinsma did face a challenge when singing the songs. Because if she used her own voice, she would be exposed in no time. And so she tried ‘everything’ to make her voice not sound like her own. “I was really searching. I wanted to create a rock-like sound, but that is of course a far cry. In the end I just did something. And that turned out to work.”
Why did the grande dame of the musical choose to sing Voilà in her own voice? “That song cannot be sung with a strange humming sound. That’s a shame. And my name had already been mentioned a few times, so I thought: I’ll just sing it in my own voice.”
It’s one big joke
Simone Kleinsma
The panel noticed Kleinsma in the final, but not everyone around her realized that she was hidden in the costume. Not even when she failed to perform during the first week of rehearsals for the musical De Hospita, in which she plays one of the leading roles. Kleinsma used the excuse that she ‘still had to do something’. Laughing: “So that was the final. And of course it also helped that many other colleagues were on stage themselves during the Friday evening broadcasts. That’s why they had no idea and it wasn’t too bad to keep my mouth shut all that time.”
The people who did notice her and reported it to her received a nonchalant response. “Well, then I just made a joke, like: I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t watch that program. Well, it’s one big joke,” says Kleinsma. “But that makes it a lot of fun.”
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2024-01-01 16:00:47
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