After spending the past two years in prison, Pussy Riot members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina are now doing the U.S. publicity circuit. The duo is in the country to tour our prisons and talk with human rights activists, leading up to tonight's appearance at an Amnesty International benefit in New York.
Luckily for the non-incarcerated and/or benefit-going masses, the duo (accompanied by a translator) also popped up on last night’s episode of The Colbert Report. And as anyone who has watched the excellent documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer might have guessed, the results were downright charming, with the soft-spoken Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina going barb for barb with Colbert. The duo told the host they’d been arrested for “[singing] a fun song in a church,” and after Colbert threatened to search them on the way out of the studio, quipped they’d “had two years of practice hiding things from searches.”
Colbert also spent some time prodding the two about Putin—whom the girls called “a shirtless man on a horse”—and Russia’s much-publicized anti-gay policies. After Colbert asked if the duo thought Russia’s gay citizens would “make the right decision and just stop being gay,” Alyokhina retorted that, in her experience, that kind of restriction “just turns them on even more.”
The whole 13-minute long interview is below and it's well worth watching. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer is also streaming now on HBO Go and comes out on DVD next Tuesday, Feb. 11.
The Colbert Report
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The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive