威尔·法瑞尔（《首映》）

Chill Will Ferrell
Whether it comes to baring his ass, providing more cowbell, or showing his serious side in 'Stranger Than Fiction,' Will Ferrell has always been fearless. Now, as he goes for the gold in 'Blades of Glory,' will it be the elusive triple lutz that gives him his biggest challenge?

By Fred Schruers

Will Ferrell's Hollywood Hills retreat is hardly in the boondocks — you could almost imagine socking a golf ball onto Hollywood Boulevard with a long drive and a few great downhill bounces — but when you come around a twisty road to his gate, you pause. Not that his driveway's way steep, but if you miss first gear, the next stop might be Tijuana.

This tract of lush growth was once a woodland hunting preserve for the town's elite, and the name of his street, which Ferrell will ask us not to reveal, translates to "a whale's vagina."

Actually, that's no truer than when Ferrell's Ron Burgundy character tried to impress Christina Applegate's Veronica Corningstone by proffering those three words as the German translation for San Diego.

In truth, the streets near here were first populated by actors: Dolores Del Rio, Boris Karloff, and other swells. As your car perches at the gate, pointing skyward, a discreet sign by the intercom alerts you to expect dogs once the gates swing open, and as you crest the driveway, Ferrell's Dalmatian, Charlie, is there wagging his tail. Two other canines are elsewhere, perhaps down the path, demarcated by tree-branch fencing that would seem to make it suitable for overgrown elves. In the coming months, Ferrell and family will move to a single, eco-friendly house being built nearby.

The actor emerges from what's called the Upper House, clad in a dress shirt, shorts, and sneakers, his ginger-brown hair bushier than one might expect. Even though his all-electric car trumps the visitor's Prius as a symbol of carbon neutrality, he doesn't fail to give it props.

The environment-minded Ferrell has long been a devout member of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and when the group held a fundraiser three years ago, Ferrell was there in full "Mission Accomplished" flight-suit gear, introduced as "the President of the United States" by Tom Hanks to deliver a sedulously obtuse speech in full Dubya mode ("Frankly, a lot of endangered species are gonna be extincted"). Later this day, Ferrell will say that he likes to play characters who are "in the same mold of unearned confidence, just really brash and cocky with kind of an undercurrent of complete insecurity."

Ferrell has in fact become a master at that very particular art, an heir to the likes of Bill Murray and Steve Martin, not without, as reinforced by his Saturday Night Live stint, a nod to the pratfalling, confused suburbanite that was Chevy Chase's comic persona. His seven years on the show brought us his iconic Bush, a men's boutique proprietor so simperingly smug his fellow cast members simply gave in to giggles on the air, the zealous cheerleader Craig, and perhaps most memorable, an impression of Janet Reno that was equal parts dead-on impersonation and transvestite giraffe. Some two dozen films later, even a handful of clinkers has done little to undercut his likability or, as last year's $148 million Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby proved, his bankability.

This year, Ferrell has again stepped outside the creative cocoon formed with longtime collaborator Adam McKay to serve as, in his words, "a hired gun" in the ice-skating comedy Blades of Glory, in which Ferrell's buckskinned, lounge-lizard, Chazz, is forced, thanks to a massive public gaffe, to enter into a pairs competition with Jon Heder's tormented skating prodigy, Jimmy. "We kind of joked," says Heder, "that I learned more of the pretty tricks — we looked at it as if I was the show pony, he's the Clydesdale." The veteran made the relative newcomer feel welcome at once. Ferrell, says Heder, has a quality that's not easy to define. "I find it hard to describe as innocent — more of a quiet dignity. He's not rude or crass; he's a Boy Scout — thoughtful, very kind, brave, and truthful."

Says Will Speck, who collaborated with Josh Gordon on writing and directing Blades: "I think all of Will's best character work comes from the fact he's a writer. Because they're never two-dimensional characters — there's always the other side, of vulnerability or the insight into somebody's insecurity. We really benefited early on from that process, looking through the script with him and figuring out, how do you deepen this character that's the bad boy of skating and make him someone you feel empathy for?"

Ferrell sits for the interview in the airy living room that's built for comfort, not show. Off that room is a bathroom with a notable design element. Where one would typically find a mirror over the sink, his house has a large circular window looking bang into an ivy-covered wall. This unspoken ego-adjusting device seems to underscore that Ferrell has little eagerness for self-reflection. And yet, as his responses ultimately show, he has something of a knack for it.

PREMIERE: You and your wife, Viveca Paulin, have a three-year-old, Magnus, and in late December came Mattias. Is it the classic thing, after having the first you're now much more relaxed around the next?

You become borderline lackadaisical. At the hospital the nurse sums it up like, "The first baby, you sanitize. The second, you spit-polish."

And in your own life, as the first of two boys?

I was the first, so I probably got all the scrutiny.

And yet here you are in this godless profession of show business.

Yeah, I grew up — was born in Newport Beach, so I'm one of the Orange County entertainment mafia that includes Steve Martin, Kevin Costner, Michelle Pfeiffer, and No Doubt. But I grew up in Irvine and went to USC. My folks got divorced when I was eight years old; my brother was five. Dad's a musician, played a long time with the Righteous Brothers. He's keyboard, saxophone, and vocals. And I kind of watched the entertainment industry through his eyes and his experiences — the ups and downs of [life in] nightclubs. He came out here initially, then brought my mom, and they lived down in San Juan Capistrano at a motel; Dad played music and Mom was a cocktail waitress. This was Orange County in the '60s, before the tract homes and all that stuff.

So, not as romantic as it may sound. You've played a lot of misguided, frustrated musicians.

I definitely saw the ups and downs of what Dad had to go through, and my mantra even as a little kid was, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to have a real job, I'm going to own a house and be a businessman. I didn't know what that meant as a little kid, but I wasn't going to do this crazy thing [he did].

Those income stops and starts can impinge on your sense of security.

Totally. And then of course slowly but surely as I went through school, I learned that it was easy for me to make people laugh and get friends that way — and I just instinctually loved comedy just from watching it. But I still kept it suppressed in the sense that I didn't go out for the high school play. I didn't do any of that.

I played tons of sports, and in college too. I ended up going to 'SC 'cause they had a sports journalism degree. And I thought, That's my way to have a legitimate job that's got a little bit of entertainment aspect to it. And then I got out of college and saw that, gosh, breaking into that field is almost as hard as being an actor. I really didn't have the toughness to try to get a tape together and get hired at, you know, a small TV station in Yuma, Arizona.

So it really wasn't till after college that I started taking classes at the Groundlings, started trying a little bit of stand-up comedy — 'cause in the early '90s, almost every place in town had a comedy night. I was really lucky. My mom was a huge influence in that she said, "As long as you keep doing, trying all these other things, you know you can live at home for free — this is your graduate degree. You've gotta get a job, get your gas money, but I'll give you this opportunity to explore all of these things."

What type of stand-up were you?

There's an improv [comedy club] down in Irvine, two minutes from my house. I would go and I would sit in the back of the room on their open-mike nights and gauge — "I think I'm as funny as that person" — but I didn't have the guts enough to get up there. But I found a stand-up comedy workshop in an Irvine Valley College extension course catalog. I thought, Oh my God, this is perfect. It'll force me to have to get up and perform.

The six weeks ended in a performance at the old Golden Bear down in Huntington Beach, which I think is torn down. That was the kindest audience ever, people in the class and family and friends. I thought, Oh my gosh, this is fantastic. I'm a natural.

So my first time in front of a real audience was a place called The Barn, in Tustin. It wasn't promising at all. The TV blaring in the corner, guys playing pool while you're standing up there with a microphone. I got so nervous that all of the moisture left my mouth, so I couldn't keep my upper lip from sticking to my teeth. And I kept going, gaack. I sped through my material, then "Thanks for coming, I'm Will Ferrell" — just flop sweat, the worst. I drove home, and I went, "Mom, how do you think it went?" She went, "I think you did really good. You have a nice presence. But you have a bad tic." And I said, "Mom, that's because all the moisture left my mouth."

You didn't have material about her?

No. I did material about Star Trek and listening to people order Mexican food and mispronouncing.

I'm reminded of Ron Burgundy's Spanish malapropisms. What was the next step?

I was driving all around with my odd jobs and then the stand-up faded away and I found the Groundlings — I loved actually being part of a team as opposed to being the only person up there. It was right place at the right time, and in the spring of '95, SNL came to a show and saw a bunch of us, and we all got off to a fast audition.

Then they make you a deal, and you have to perform on the high wire — clearly you took to it.

For better or for worse, I did the show seven years. Then it felt like it had just run its course; it felt like the right time to go. When I think back, Old School was in the can, but they'd actually pushed the release from November to February of 2003, which usually signals that there's trouble. And then there was a small conversation about this script called Elf that sounded like a really funny premise, but I read the script and thought, Oh, we'll probably have to work on this a bunch. So those were my prospects you know? That was it.

But you knew you had good chemistry with Adam McKay.

The Adam history started at Saturday Night Live. We were hired at the same time and started writing sketches together and shared the same comedic sensibility. We liked sitting down, taking an hour writing a sketch, and then not going back, and working really fast and kind of not judging it too much. Because SNL is a place where some writers would tend to spend a whole evening crafting this one sketch, and we found out that whether we spent the whole night or one hour it came out about the same. [laughs]

I had done Lorne Michaels's film A Night at the Roxbury, and I owed Paramount one more. Adam and I had talked about writing a screenplay maybe just for the fun of it, and I thought, Let's write an original movie that's not based on an SNL character. And so we wrote August Blowout [about a car salesman], which never got made. And we said, "I love working with you, vice versa, and so let's keep going with it."

It seems your mutual writing is moving from a row of vignettes toward more story — or with Talladega, a parody of a story.

Even though it's gone from a 10-page sketch to a 110-page movie now, we still work in the same way. We have to figure out a story, even though we're proponents of funny first and story later in a way. But we would always have this weird knee-jerk when you get the studio note "The story really could be worked on" or "What's the emotional connection between these characters?" And then you want to go, "Does anyone talk about the emotional connection in Caddyshack?"


One could spend a lot of time picking out the homages to cheeseball classics in Anchorman. Most notably, the fight downtown between the various local stations' on-air guys.

That's definitely Planet of the Apes. That was where the net came from... but we really wanted to see Steve Carell as Brick throw a trident. [laughs] The guys on horseback were Planet of the Apes. And West Side Story makes it in there.

And next thing you know, you're working with Maggie Gyllenhaal and Dustin Hoffman, and getting a Golden Globe nomination, in a highly intellectual piece called Stranger Than Fiction.

Dustin was the nicest guy and still so energetic. The first day, there's a walk-and-talk thing in a gym, and he had all the dialogue; I'm just going, "Well, yes." And he did the first take of it, and he turned to me and said, "How was that? Was it okay? I can do better." I said, "No, it seemed good. It seemed really good." But it was so sweet that he let me in, in that way.

The stakes were also pretty high playing the woody character in Melinda and Melinda.

That was either the blessing or the curse of doing that movie in a way. It was obviously written in his voice, and I wanted to try to make it my own too, and yet, it's hard to not fall into his rhythms when you do that. I was happy to see the few [reviews] that I ever even look at didn't beat me up for being a poor man's Woody Allen, you know?

A better reception than Bewitched got.

Not to say it's a perfect movie by any means, but it's definitely not as bad as what it got beat up for. I loved doing it, but for whatever reasons, it became the poster child that summer for Hollywood's inability to have original ideas.

Would you rather play a sheer innocent, like Buddy in Elf, or a more sleazy or at least misguided guy?

I like both. I really like playing super-enthusiastic people. I love playing boring people who don't know they're boring. [laughs] I love the Ricky Bobby character. Ron Burgundy's in the same mold of unearned confidence, just really brash and cocky with an undercurrent of complete, uh, insecurity [laughs] all at the same time.

Will Speck told me that early on they had to speak to you through a wall. But then he insisted he was joking. How methody are you?

I'm not. I don't know if I've ever had to play a role where I felt like I had to go to that extreme. I mean, this is going to come off as lazy, but [laughs] most movies I've gotten to do, I get to show up and be a person and then leave and go home. You don't have to call me the character's name during lunch.

Jon Heder's theory is that buddy comedies have the same formula as a love story — your two protagonists have obstacles to overcome, have their differences, and finally come together.

The script was really funny in that Jon was this kind of prodigal son, with the overbearing father who's his coach, raised to be a skater. And I'm the bad boy of skating — Chazz is ridiculous. He's basically Steven Seagal meets Steven Tyler. That's his kind of style. A lot of leather fringe, stuff like that. [laughs] He's a self-proclaimed sex-addict, but you slowly get the feeling that maybe he's had two sexual encounters his whole life. What is so funny is that we are in the flamboyant outfits and everything, but we're proud of it.

We have Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, who are a brother-and-sister pair in that kind of mold of always trying to get the spotlight as the best pairs team, and along we come. So they're the villains of the movie who are trying to do bad things to us. There's one [setup] scene after Heder and I have simultaneously won the gold medal, and as we're sharing the stand, we end up having this massive fistfight, and chaos ensues. We then have to go in front of the federation, where we find out we've been banned for life from skating.

You've got Step Brothers in the works, opposite John C. Reilly as you were in Talladega, and Semi-Pro, about a striving ABA basketball coach. In just a few years, you've created a track record that gives you great liberty to cook up your own projects. But just four years ago, you had Old School coming and no guarantee it would hit.

Yeah, there's not a lot of room for error there, and I thought, Boy, I'm just really fortunate that those things kind of worked.

I don't think it will ever not seem crazy. 'Cause I don't feel like what I do is hard work or real work in a way. I think about someone who has to go teach school in the inner city. Come on, that's hard, that's a job. I don't really have a job. I just get to live in this pretty fun state of suspended adolescence.