Steve Carell

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10 Questions for Steve Carell
Tiffany Sharples talks to comedian Steve Carell, star of The Office and Get Smart
Jun. 19, 2008
Time

From The 40-Year-Old Virgin to The Office's clueless boss Michael Scott, he's made hilariously awkward comedy an art form. His new film, Get Smart, is in theaters. Steve Carell will now take your questions

How obligated did you feel to stay true to the original Get Smart series, and how much did you modernize the character? Heather Boyle, HAMILTON, N.J.
It was daunting. I felt that the best way to pay tribute to Don Adams and the show would be to keep from doing an impersonation or a knockoff. They did it, and they did it so well, there's no reason to just duplicate it. We try to take the essence of the show and reinterpret it in a modern context.

You often play characters that are so awkward, they make people uncomfortable. Do you ever make yourself uncomfortable? Carrie Coward Bucher TONGANOXIE, KANS.
I make myself uncomfortable minute to minute. [Laughs.] Honestly, I don't necessarily make myself uncomfortable, but I do enjoy that vein of comedy. I like it when things are pushed just a little too far.

How is your character from The Office, Michael Scott, different from Ricky Gervais' David Brent [in the original U.K. version]? Adrian Kung PASADENA, CALIF.
I didn't watch too much David Brent because I didn't want to be inclined to do an impersonation of Ricky Gervais. But I can tell you how they are alike better than how they are different: they both don't have a great deal of self-awareness and go through life with a bit of an emotional blind spot.

Are any of Michael Scott's quirks inspired by your own? Chris Cox, RESTON, VA.
I'm sure there are elements of Michael Scott that are a part of me. I would rather not know exactly what they are. One thing people often say is that if you don't know a Michael Scott, then you are Michael Scott. Food for thought.

If you didn't pursue acting, what would you be doing? Andre Rosario EGG HARBOR, N.J.
I would teach history and coach a couple of sports. I think that would make me very, very happy. That's always been my backup plan.

Are you ever intimidated by the performance level that is expected of you? Ryan Timothy, PHOENIX
Not until that question. I didn't realize that there was a performance level expected of me until right this instant. So, yes, from here on out, I'm a bit petrified. I will now become a teacher for sure.

Does your wife [actress Nancy Walls] think you're funny? Jonathan Butler GREENSBORO, KANS.
She does. I get her sense of humor, I think, better than anybody else, and she gets mine better than anybody else. She is the smartest, funniest person I've ever met. I always look to her as a barometer of whether it's good or not.

Do you support Barack Obama or John McCain? Rodrigo Carlón, MADRID
I'll be voting for Ron Paul, come hell or high water. [Laughs.] Not really. I stay clear of declaring my political choices. I feel like my voice is no more valuable, no less valuable than anyone else's.

Given your success with comedic roles, what drives you to do more serious characters? Is this to avoid being typecast? Kevin DeLury, SAN FRANCISCO
I try not to do things based on how I think they will make people perceive me. I don't want to be too precious about any specific role; I just want to have fun. Otherwise, what's the point?

Would you ever get your body hair waxed again for a role? Terry Owings, AUCKLAND
That, I would have to give serious thought to. Having that done for 40-Year-Old Virgin was one of the most painful things I've ever experienced. I tend not to get roles that call for me walking around bare-chested, so I doubt that that will be demanded. But, I suppose, anything for the art.

On a self-awareness scale of 1-10, where would you rank your character from The Office, Michael Scott? —Ankur Pandya in CAMBRIDGE, MA
0.7. Every now and then he spikes up to about a 4 or a 4.5, but if he were to gain any more self-awareness than he has I believe his head would explode. Once he had the realization as to how other people view him, that would be incredibly difficult.

Did you find it difficult to play a character and be in a series that was already a huge hit in the UK without being compared to that original series? —Mike Payne, OKLAHOMA CITY
It's very daunting. The bar was set so high with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant that we tried to take some of the pressure off of ourselves; we knew the template was great but we had no delusions of trying to improve upon the original. We tried to lower everybody's expectations, frankly, tried to set the bar within reason, because there was no way I was going to recreate anything close to what Ricky Gervais did. So I tried to take that pressure off of myself, and just base [Michael Scott] on the essence of the character that [Gervais] created and do the best that I could within those parameters.

With everything going on in current events, do you sometimes wish you were still working for The Daily Show? —Rachel Hamilton, PARIS, IL
I do, especially now with the conventions coming up and knowing the kind of fun that they're going to have when they get out there in the field. I miss it, and I miss the people. I miss Jon [Stewart] a lot, I miss Stephen [Colbert] a lot. They're good friends of mine. I envy that, but at this point, I am so far out of the loop in terms of my political acumen. I have such a cursory knowledge of [politics] right now, that I think I would be worthless.

Of all of your movies, which was your favorite character to play? —Alex Saenz, Tipton, Iowa
Brick Tamland [from Anchorman] was pretty fun. I just laughed until I cried every day on that movie. And I didn't have to do very much. I just kind of stood there in the background, and Adam McKay, who directed Anchorman, would instruct me to just say whatever I wanted to say, to find an opening and say something—usually a non sequitur of some sort. It could not have been more fun. To play a person who was completely disconnected with reality was just a good, fun time.

Who are your favorite contemporary comedians? —Pedro Serra, RIO DE JANEIRO
It depends on what you define as contemporary. I am a huge fan of Alan Arkin. I think he is such a great actor and such a funny person, and so dry and so smart. In terms of people who are my age and my generation, wow, there are so many. Jim Carrey is a brilliant physical comedian and also has a great handle on more dramatic roles. I've enjoyed Ben Stiller in a ton of things. Sacha Baron Cohen, I think, is amazing, the way he disappears into the character. Seth Rogen is one of the funniest people I've ever met. There are a lot of them. Tina Fey is one of the other funniest people that I know. I knew her a little bit back when I worked at Second City—she was a couple of years behind me—I think she is really gifted. And, Dave Chappelle, I'm sorry that his show isn't on. I hope that he creates something new, because we need him.

With raunchy comedies becoming the latest Hollywood trend in the last couple of years, do you believe comedic cinema is regressing? —Sara Nguyen in HARRISBURG, PA
I think it's all cyclical. I think things having to do with comedy just change, and it's so subjective. What makes one person laugh will definitely not make another laugh, and I don't think there's any one universally funny thing. That's why there are so many different veins of comedy. Slapstick has been around forever, gross out humor, stoner humor, drier stuff, romantic comedy, there are all sorts of different kinds of things that appeal to different people, which I think is great. There's a little bit of something for everybody.

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Carell stays in The Office
Steve signs for three more years

Steve Carell has signed up to star in the American version of The Office for three more years. It had been rumoured that he would be abandoning his role as regional manager Michael Scott as his movie career takes off. However, he has now confirmed that he and other key cast members of the NBC sitcom have all committed to stay.

He said: ‘All of the main cast are signed for three more. Beyond that, I have no idea.’

Last month's season finale introduced a possible love interest for Scott, in the form of a new human resources boss, played by Amy Ryan. Carell added: ‘I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next episode, but I can’t wait to find out. I think Amy Ryan will be coming back, which I'm looking forward to because I thought she was terrific.’

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Excellent news - that's another 60-70 episodes to come! Ya beauty.

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Steve Carell, star of the American Office, is this year's clown prince
In a parallel universe, Hollywood’s comedy king would have been a lawyer. So what went right?
Stephen Armstrong
August 3rd 2008
timesonline.co.uk

There’s a moment in Jim Carrey’s 2003 hit Bruce Almighty where you can actually see cultural tectonic plates crash against each other. Carrey’s television reporter has been given God’s powers and uses them to humiliate a rival who took a presenting job he craved. The rival, played by the then unknown Steve Carell, tries to deliver a news report while losing control of his tongue. Carell’s battle between stern professionalism and the gibberish that pours from his lips is the single funniest piece of slapstick in the film. You think: “Saints alive, that man is out-Carreying Carrey!”

At that point, Carell was an anchor on the American spoof news programme The Daily Show and part of a loose coalition of comics such as Judd Apatow, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller, known collectively as the Frat Pack. Around the time that Carell stole Carrey’s show, the whole crew broke through. The year 2004 saw Starsky and Hutch, Dodgeball and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy clean up at the box office, with Carell riffing as the surreally dim weatherman Brick Tamland in Anchorman. He was on the way somewhere, with his effortless twinning of smart slapstick and knitwear-model appearance.

Then this side of the Atlantic sucked in its collective breath when Carell was cast as the lead in the American version of The Office. He would be playing a version of David Brent, one of the 10 defining sitcom characters in British television history. An American hotshot having the cheek to try to play our man? That’s akin to Joey from Friends giving Captain Mainwaring a try. The feeling was the same among LA’s devoted fans of Ricky Gervais’s sitcom.

“When I was invited to audition for Michael Scott, people treated me as if I had a disease,” Carell recalls with grim humour, sitting neatly on a sofa at the Dorchester. It’s slightly disconcerting to face him, as he really does sit up straight and wears neatly ironed trousers. Every now and then, you’re briefly terrified that this is some sort of existential experience and you’re in one of his movies, waiting for him to explode into madness. Then the moment passes and his polite tones continue unbroken. “They said, ‘You have to be crazy even auditioning for this, Steve. It’s going to be terrible. The original is so well loved, there will be acrimony, hatred and doubt. It’s a worthless cause.’” He pauses and smiles. “Which sort of took the pressure off. The expectations were so incredibly low that even if it was sort-of-kind-of-a-little-bit good, people would be pleasantly surprised.”

Gradually, very gradually, the feeling of pleasant surprise began to spread. Carell’s Scott has some Brent characteristics - the complete inability to relate to other people’s emotions, for instance - but, as the show’s second and third seasons each have twice the total number of UK episodes ever filmed, the writers had to go somewhere else with the characters. Scott, the regional manager of the Scranton branch of the paper-distribution company Dunder Mifflin, is slightly psychotic, but generally more sympathetic than Brent. He tries to save colleagues’ jobs, rather than stuff them, as Brent did, but still has insanely grandiose ideas - he notes that the fact he shares a birthday with Eva Longoria would make a good conversational gambit if he met Teri Hatcher. Indeed, Carell has reworked Scott so completely that even when he utters the odd Brent line - friend first, boss second and “probably an entertainer/comedian third” - it somehow sounds completely fresh.

“I borrow from Ricky that Michael has to be the one person on the show that, no matter how different the other characters are, they can agree on one thing - this person is terrible,” Carell smiles. “Before I auditioned, I watched some episodes, and it frightened the hell out of me because it was so good. I thought I’d better stop in case I ended up doing an impression of him.”

Despite its intrinsic quality, The Office: An American Workplace struggled to draw ratings and NBC was close to cancelling the series. Then Carell pulled a blinder. He pitched an idea to his chum Judd Apatow that, almost overnight, became the hit movie The Forty-Year-Old Virgin. “It was odd,” Carell nods. “I told Judd, he liked it, he talked to an exec at Universal, she bought it on the spot, we wrote it in a couple of months over the summer. Three days after we handed it in, they greenlit the project. That basically never happens, although I didn’t know that at the time.”

The idea of a 40-year-old trying to get his end away had so much gross-out potential, it was a relief to find Carell delivering the lead without any Farrelly-brothers clowning. “The thing that makes me laugh is when a character isn’t aware he’s in a comedy,” Carell explains. “I hesitate even to invoke his name, but Peter Sellers could do these outlandish broad characters, yet never winked at the camera and never let on that he or the character thought they were doing anything funny. That’s the kind of comedy I grew up liking — but I hesitate to say that because I’m not trying to compare myself with someone of that stature.”

The success of The Forty-Year-Old Virgin kept The Office on air, the success of The Office boosted Carell’s profile and led him to choose a small indie film next, which became Little Miss Sunshine — and Carell was a star. When The Devil Wears Prada’s star, Anne Hathaway, was asked who she thought would play well with her in a big-budget remake of the 1960s spoof spy television series Get Smart, she said it could only be Steve Carell. The man was an overnight success.

Except he wasn’t. Carell took ages to get here. “Basically, I was planning to be a lawyer,” he explains. “That was my goal through college — I enjoyed acting as a hobby, but not as a career choice. My parents, God love them, worked hard to put me through some good schools, and I felt an obligation to make something of myself in a respectable profession. To come to them and say ‘I want to piss on all the money you spent and become an actor’ just didn’t seem the right thing to do. But I was filling out my law-school applications and got stuck on the question ‘Why do you want to be a lawyer?’. I couldn’t answer that, other than to say it sounded good. So my parents said, ‘What have you always liked to do?’ Acting came up, and they said, ‘It’s your life. You don’t want to be stuck in a job every day just for us.’ I’m so happy they’re around to enjoy this, because they’re sitting there taking credit for everything.”

Carell worked in the Chicago improv comedy troupe Second City, where he met his wife, Nancy Walls. “She was bartending across the street. After I would do a show, I would sit at the bar and talk to her. We sort of backed into the idea of going on a date because we were both really shy. I would say, ‘Boy, if I were ever to go on a date, it would be with someone like you’, and she’d say, ‘I bet I would date someone like you’, until I finally said, ‘Do you want to?’, and she said okay.”

Carell’s move into television, however, was fraught with catastrophe. His biog lists many 1990s shows described as “short-lived” or “briefly aired”, including the train wreck that was 1996’s Dana Carvey Show. “It was very funny and had some great people working for it,” he insists. “Charlie Kaufman [screenwriter of Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind] was a staff writer. Stephen Colbert [host of the hit series The Colbert Report] wrote for it. But we knew with the first sketch of the first show that we were going to fail. It involved Dana, as Clinton, giving a speech about how he was going to be the nurturing president. To show this, he opened his shirt [Carrell falls about laughing, taking some time to catch his breath] and he had a prosthetic breastplate with eight nipples that lactated [gasp] . . . And he had golden retriever puppies suckling on his chest.”

He straightens up. “This was pre-Monica Lewinsky, and people did not take kindly to making that kind of fun of our president. The networks can chart ratings very accurately, and they charted how quickly ours fell from the opening of our first programme. We knew the writing was on the wall immediately.”

The Daily Show saved Carell, allowing him to create the straight-faced anchor persona that shot him onto the big screen in Bruce Almighty. Now he’s taking on another of television’s sacred comedy heroes, although this time it’s a man held dear in American, rather than British, hearts. Mel Brooks created Get Smart in the 1960s to mock James Bond, with Maxwell Smart an agent at the spy organisation Control. “The original actor was Don Adams - his version of the guy was so specific, people still impersonate him,” Carell explains. “I figured it was like doing The Office. You have to avoid copying the hero. My Max is not a bumbling idiot. He’s fairly proficient - he can fight, he can fire a gun - but he’s a bit accident-prone. Sort of Cary Grant in North by Northwest, but less attractive. And less charming.”

The film has done well enough in America for talk of a sequel, but Carell is most chuffed that his seven-year-old daughter saw it. “I had to prepare her for a scene where you see me with my trousers off,” he explains. “I said, ‘You’re going to go see this with your friends, and you’re going to see my naked butt. Are you going to get embarrassed? Because you don’t have to go.’ She said, ‘Is it funny?’ I said, ‘I think so.’ And she said, ‘Well, okay then.’” He beams a smile of pride so wide that he resembles Jim Carrey as the Mask. Except funnier.

[Twirley]

Oh, I'm so glad. The Office is great. Can't wait to see what Michael Scott gets up to in the next series.

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Steve Carell set for new movie

Steve Carell, the star of the American version of 'The Office', is to play the lead role in a new comedy called 'Dumped'. Variety reports that the film follows the trials and tribulations of a man after his wife suddenly files for divorce.

Carell is planning to produce the film through his company Carousel Production. He will next be seen on cinema screens opposite '30 Rock' star Tina Fey in the comedy 'Date Night'.

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This will be one to look out for - his scenes when he was splitting up with 'Jan' in the series were powerfully painful!