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Features
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No Longer a Hollywood Virgin
Steve Carell hasn’t been around the film business long enough to buy into all that box office analyst doom and gloom about Evan Almighty’s first weekend numbers.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007 at 1:45 PM
By Brent Simon
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Brian Ach/WireImage.com
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Courting the MTV daily show, a.k.a. TRL
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There’s a time-honored axiom in the film business that comedy is harder than drama, so while dramatic performances are typically lauded come awards season — and the actors that give them both well respected and rewarded — Hollywood also enthusiastically keeps its eye out for new comedic talent, since more often than not it’s those types of movies, typically cheaper to produce, that keep their coffers filled.
While the well certainly hasn’t run dry, in the past five or six years, several of Hollywood’s tried-and-true comic performers have become a bit less consistently bankable, whether it’s Jim Carrey and Will Smith each taking the time to stretch and make more dramatic fare (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Number 23, The Pursuit of Happyness, etcetera) or a few films of stalwart stars, like Robin Williams’ RV, underperforming.
In the interim, Steve Carell has emerged as one of the most sought after comedic actors in Hollywood. (Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell can’t headline everything, after all.) First gaining recognition for his contributions as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s Emmy-winning The Daily Show, Carell has successfully segued into primetime television and above-the-title status in the film world with equal aplomb.
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John Shearer/WireImage.com
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Ferrell and Cohen at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards
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Carell’s day job, of course, is on the Americanized adaptation of the acclaimed British television series The Office, in which he plays Michael Scott, the blithely unaware, socially inept boss of the small-town branch of a paper company. In its third season, the NBC sitcom continues to flourish in the ratings and has earned Carell both an Emmy nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy and a Golden Globe win for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy.
In the late summer of 2005, just after The Office caught on a bit, Carell opened his first feature film as a leading man, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which he co-wrote with director Judd Apatow. A rare, R-rated comedy smash that wasn’t also pitched solely at teen-skewing audiences, the movie went on to gross more than $175 million worldwide, ringing up another $100 million-plus in DVD sales in North America alone.
Evan Almighty, then, easily represents Carell’s biggest screen venture to date, because it just so happens to also be the most expensive comedy ever produced. A spin-off of 2003’s $480 million worldwide hit Bruce Almighty, the movie is part Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, part Noah’s ark bible story, and finds Carell reprising his character of Evan Baxter, a Buffalo news anchor who has been recently elected to Congress. Packing up his family, consisting of wife Joan (Lauren Graham) and three sons, Evan settles into a new house and life, but quickly finds this world turned upside down when God (Morgan Freeman) appears and instructs him to build an ark.
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Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com
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Carrey, humbly accepting the Generation kudo at the 2006 MTV Movie Awards
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For Carell, the opportunity to both reprise the role of Evan Baxter and reconnect with director Tom Shadyac - who has a history in broad comedies with comfortably chewy moralistic centers - was one he couldn’t pass up. “Bruce Almighty was the first movie I ever did and Tom took very good care of me,” Carell tells FilmStew. “It’s funny, because when I went to the premiere of that, I had no idea I’d even be in the final cut.”
“It was right here at Universal Amphitheatre, and there my scene was, intact,” he marvels. “It was sort of a dream, because a couple years before I got the part I remember watching Liar Liar and the outtakes, and Jim Carrey was making everyone laugh. I was struck by how much fun they all seemed to be having, and then two years later I was doing Bruce Almighty and it was exactly like that. So then the chance to work with Tom, again, in sort of a one-on-one basis, was like a dream come true.”
Carell was interested in expanding his role because of the direction in which Evan, a character with relatively little screen time in the first film, could go. “I think this story is more of Evan’s journey to find out who he really is, as opposed to who he’s been posturing to be,” says Carell. “His campaign promises were about changing the world, but they’re empty. And along the way, he finds that a platitude is one thing, but actual effort and self-awareness is something that is only gained through pain, suffering or introspection.”
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Albert L. Ortega/WireImage.com
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A license to still make people laugh
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“I see the movie as a fable,” Carell continues. “It’s a comedy based upon a story from the Old Testament, but I don’t see it as a religious comedy in any way, shape or form. I think it’s mainly a tale about a guy who has to make a huge leap of faith.”
While its Stateside opening this weekend of just over $31 million marked it as a disappointment in some quarters, Evan Almighty has yet to open in most markets abroad, where its very easily translatable story should give it a stronger mooring than many traditional comedies. Regardless, it won’t be a complete washout, and box office analysts seem to agree that Carell has proven his comedic bona fides.
The man himself, meanwhile, doesn’t seem entirely used to the limelight, or ready to wildly embrace it — a marked contract from the whirling dervish personalities of Carrey and Williams, or the sardonic playfulness of Ferrell. He seems… strangely normal. “How the last few years came about has been very surreal for me,” says Carell. “When I met with Tom Shadyac for this [movie], I thought that he was going to pitch the idea of a sequel, starring Jim, with me as a sort of thorn-in-his-side character. And then when he said we’d like you to play the title role, I said, ‘You had me at hello.’”
“So I’m willing to take pretty much any job offered to me,” continues Carell, with enough amiable modesty and seeming sincerity to allow him to pull off such gross misstatements. “I’m pretty amenable, I don’t really have a path set, like, ‘Well, I need to do this kind of movie and then that, and then I need to switch it up and play a psychopathic killer. I don’t look at it that way.”
“I’m the type of person who’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop, so I’m not taking anything for granted,” he continues. “I know that there’s a window of time that I’ll be able to do these things, so I’m just trying to do that now, while at the same time be very cautious to not let it interfere with my family life. That to me is the only line [of reference] — if it starts to bleed over into time away from my family, then it’s sort of not going to happen. But so far I’ve been able to balance those things.”
| Balance, indeed. Looking at Carell, he could be your average insurance salesman, or the guy trying to get you to set up an IRA. Despite throngs of adoring fans for his talk show appearances and sorts of acclaim for his comedic personae, Carell seems distinctly divided from his performance instinct, let alone any accruing hype. In fact, Carell finds it a bit weird to be compared to comedy stars like Carrey. “I take it as a huge compliment to even be mentioned in the same sentence as him. I’ve enjoyed all of his movies,” Carell says.
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“I was living in Chicago and maybe a day after the original Ace Ventura opened, before it had really caught on, I went during the day, and there might have been four people in a large theater,” Carell recalls. “And from the opening credit sequence we were howling. And I remember the guy in front of me turning around and looking at me, and saying, ‘I know, I can’t believe it!’ We’d found this thing, the four of us. It was like we were in a little club together, we were witnessing something special.”
A decade later, he’s up on that screen. And no matter how blithely he tends to it, Carell’s own club is getting bigger.
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