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.)
Ferrell ended up studying sports broadcasting, not realizing at first why he had chosen that course. “I was placating myself. I saw that as a more legitimate way to be an entertainer. I understood later that I had wanted all along to try my hand at comedy, but I was scared of the uncertainty. Sports broadcasting seemed like a more solid career, less treacherous. But as I got closer to graduating, I knew I should try this thing” — this thing being comedy — “rather than suppressing it.” He moved back home and started on the long path of auditions and rejections that is the lot of any aspiring comic.
Only the path wasn’t that long, he points out, a touch shamefully. And there weren’t many rejections, either. He joined the LA comedy troupe the Groundlings in the early 1990s. Within three years he was a regular on the TV show Saturday Night Live, where Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy and John Belushi started out. What about working the circuit, I ask, and paying your dues? He laughs. “I got SNL with a bit of a guilty conscience. There were people who had been at the Groundlings for six or seven years and became my teachers. For me to then get picked for SNL after three years ... I was, like, ‘Um, sorry I got this.’” He looks embarrassed. “I felt like a mouse who found this hunk of cheese that nobody else got.”
Ferrell describes starting on SNL in 1995 as “a very scary dream come true.” Adam McKay, who joined the show’s writing team in the same year, remembers meeting Ferrell. “The other writers and I thought Will was the straight man. It wasn’t until the first read-through that I thought, ‘Holy crap, he’s amazing.’ He could do all these characters, he was a great straight man, and then he proved he could write. The writing staff fell in love with him very early on.”
Ferrell contributed scalding impressions of George Bush and Ted Kennedy, and created Gene Frenkle, a fictional member of Blue Oyster Cult, whose inept cowbell playing repeatedly spoils the group’s attempts to record (Don’t Fear) the Reaper. The character appeared in only one sketch, but turned out to be Ferrell’s most popular creation. “Even now, people present me with cowbells to sign,” he says, sounding bewildered.
McKay believes Ferrell’s persona dovetailed neatly with the mid-1990s mood of the show. “The cast was this really well-adjusted group of people. It wasn’t the crazy, drug-addled SNL of the 1970s and 1980s. We had the advantage of seeing what fame had done to those people who had gone before. The new intake was made up of anti-celebrities who reacted against that excess. I think people still respond to that in Will. He knows pompous big shots are ridiculous, and that there’s a hard fall waiting for them. He has a pretty healthy outlook on the whole joke of wealth and fame and Hollywood.”
While he was still at SNL, Ferrell began dallying in movies, including the deservedly disliked A Night at the Roxbury, in which he played a dorkish poseur whose delusions of cool are undermined by the fact that — you guessed it — he still lives at home with his parents. His fortunes changed with a part in Ben Stiller’s 2001 catwalk comedy Zoolander. Ferrell quit SNL a year later, and the rest is a tally of box-office figures with zeroes on the end like never-ending smoke rings.
Anchorman, Talladega Nights (2006) and Blades of Glory (2007) were all hits, and McKay confirms that an Anchorman sequel is on the boil. While the Frat Pack has more or less dispersed, Ferrell is tight with the new comedy kings: Judd Apatow, who produced Step Brothers, and Seth Rogen, who has a cameo part in the film.
But is there a change in the offing? In 2005, Ferrell took his first straightish part, as a tax inspector who hears a voice narrating his life, in Stranger Than Fiction. It was a quirky film that provided him with one of those semi-dramatic roles comics love because it shows off their range. Today, Ferrell is weighing up other “straight” scripts. “I don’t have this yearning to be respected or taken seriously. But it does bother me that comedy isn’t considered hard to do.”
He put his case most eloquently in a song he performed with Jack Black and John C. Reilly at the 2007 Academy awards ceremony. It began with Ferrell reciting: “A comedian at the Oscars/ Is the saddest man of all/ Your movies may make millions/ But your name they’ll never call,” and ended with him resolving to play “a guy with no arms and legs/ Who teaches gang bangers Hamlet.” Somewhere in between, he wistfully imagined dining with Jeremy Irons, then threatened to break Ryan Gosling’s hips.
As with most comedy, its intent was deadly serious. “I don’t think the producers of the show even got what we were doing,” he says, despair creeping into his voice. “They were backstage saying, ‘Oh, that was lovely. Very funny.’ They didn’t realize every word was true.”
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