If the look on Will Ferrell’s face is anything to go by, I am not the first person today to ask about his scrotum. In fairness, he has been talking about it — and the part it plays in his new comedy, Step Brothers — for some weeks now. What I wanted to know was not whether the scrotum glimpsed on screen is prosthetic (it is), or, if so, whether he had to model for it (he claims he did), but how two grown men — Ferrell and the movie’s director, Adam McKay, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay — came to conceive of a scene in which Ferrell’s character gives his stepbrother’s beloved drumkit what can only be described as a comprehensive tea-bagging.
“We made a list of all the things we’d never seen in a film, and then we tried to get them into the script,” explains 41-year-old Ferrell when we meet at a London hotel. The implication being: it’s not rocket science, pal.
The drumkit incident is the culmination of a tit-for-tat campaign between Brennan (Ferrell), a 39-year-old crybaby who still lives at home, and Dale (John C. Reilly), a similarly stunted 40-year-old whose father marries Brennan’s mother. Ferrell’s specialty is playing innocent or self-absorbed types unaware of how out of sync they are with the world around them. In Elf (2003), he is Santa’s gangliest helper, lost in New York in his felt suit and pixie shoes, mistaking the gum on the subway handrail for free candy. In the glorious Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), he plays a strutting 1970s newscaster who considers himself catnip to women. And in Step Brothers, he plays a character who can’t see what is sleazy about a middle-aged man gawping at TV aerobics shows, one hand grasping at a pile of nachos, the other rummaging in his underwear.
It would be difficult to underestimate the popularity of these various infantilized boy-men, who enjoyed a resurgence with the rise of the Frat Pack — Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and the Wilson brothers, Owen and Luke. If you want to put a price on it, try US$20 million — the salary that Ferrell has commanded since 2005. (Yes, even for Bewitched.)
“I keep getting drawn back to these innocents,” he smiles, stretching his long legs beneath the coffee table. He is a proper Gulliver; his crown of tight brown curls, tiny pleading eyes and suggestion of controlled mania make him resemble an XL-sized Gene Wilder. In person, he is cheery but soft-spoken, as though concerned not to cause offence. Which is ironic, really, given all that drumkit business, not to mention his turns as a sexually ravenous jailbird in Starsky & Hutch (2004) and a player cruising funerals in Wedding Crashers (2005).
Ferrell cast his mind back to his early teens, he says, to capture Brennan’s timid, withdrawn nature. “I didn’t feel sure-footed back then. Had I not taken this career path, it’s likely that I would have just sat at home and waited for the perfect job to come along.” His confidence increased when he started goofing around at school; he perfected the trick of appearing to walk into a door, which was a hit with his classmates.
But as the son of Lee Ferrell, a keyboard player with the Righteous Brothers, he concluded that the entertainer’s life was not for him. “My brother and I witnessed the instability of what our father did. He’d be working at a nightclub for a year. Then one evening we would say, ‘Are you going to work tonight, dad?’ and he would say, ‘No, we’re not playing there any more.’ I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, this is tough.’ I knew I’d have to get a real job when I grew up. I didn’t know what I’d do, but it would have to involve carrying a briefcase. And I’d definitely live in a house.” Having been raised in a two-bedroom apartment in Irvine, California, he was certain about wanting that house. (Now he’s got one, as well as a summer home in Gnesta, with his Swedish wife, the actor Viveca Paulin, and their two children.)
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