Quotes of the Day
Anyone famous here?" yells Melrose Larry Green, as he walks toward our sidewalk table at Los Angeles' Urth Caffe. Will Ferrell prepares for the inevitable embarrassing encounter with the professional annoyer and Howard Stern regular. But Green, who talks to almost everyone else at the restaurant, passes Ferrell right by. After Green finally leaves, Ferrell pretends to call his publicist to scream at him, "What are you doing wrong? Did I wave at him? No. But I shouldn't have to."
Ferrell, despite being very tall and having red hair, doesn't stick out. He looks backgroundy, and his shockingly mellow demeanor makes him extra-unnoticeable. But when Ferrell is on, he's a gale force of guileless enthusiasm. He's John Belushi with control, Pee-wee Herman without the creepiness, Mr. Bean with mastery of his motor skills. He's the comedian you want to simultaneously laugh at, hug and down a beer with. Now, after seven years of yelling, saucering his eyes and flailing his hands on Saturday Night Live, Ferrell, 36, is getting a shot at becoming a movie star. And unlike many SNL alums, he has a pretty clear crack at it.
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In Elf, which opens this week, Ferrell gets to run around in the same kind of custom-built playground Jack Black enjoys in School of Rock. He stars as a clueless human raised at the North Pole who is horrified to find out he's not an elf. He goes to Manhattan ostensibly to meet his biological father but really to fulfill the point of the movie: getting himself overly excited about everything else he finds there. He tries to impress a date by taking her to a diner that advertises the WORLD'S BEST CUP OF COFFEE, waves back at people hailing taxis and receives each advertising flyer as if it were a gift. And, since it's a Christmas movie, he brings his dad's broken family together and falls in love with a department-store elf (Zooey Deschanel). His spastic exuberance is partly counterbalanced by the tenderness given to the film by director Jon Favreau, working from a script by first-timer David Berenbaum. "His humor has a real vulnerability to it," says Favreau, who first met Ferrell on the set of Old School, which went on to become a $75 million box-office hit earlier this year. "He was really sweet and nice and quiet. It was hard to evaluate his energy on that set, though, because he was always naked."
When he's not acting, Ferrell's humor is so much more subtle — and slowly whispered — that it can be confusing. His first week on SNL, before the table reading during which he got to yell like a madman, he believed that no one thought he was going to be funny. On the set of Woody Allen's new movie, in which he has the starring role, thanks to Allen's unwillingness to pay to insure Robert Downey Jr., he's having some trouble relating to the director, though that's probably not Ferrell's fault. "Woody Allen has been nothing but nice and complimentary to me, but every time I've tried to joke with him, I get nothing," Ferrell says. "He thanked me for doing the script and asked me if I liked it, and I said I really liked the car crashes. He went, 'Uh-huh. Anyway.'" Ferrell's so low-key that he's awed by the energy of Green, who, like a Ferrell character incarnate, is raving to an uncomfortable couple about Iraq and Mike Tyson's innocence. "Unearned self-importance is so amusing to me," Ferrell says. "He has so much energy. I have to save it for when it counts."
He will be using a lot more of it in the future, with the barrage of movie roles he has been offered. "After Old School came out, it was a different universe," he says. "I like to think it was because everyone saw how funny it was, but it's because it made a lot of money." His next project, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, about a '70s local newscaster, which he co-wrote, had very little studio interest until Old School, at which point he got a $25 million budget from DreamWorks. This winter he'll be shooting another comedy he conceived, about kids' soccer. He is the voice of the Man in the Yellow Hat in the 2005 animated version of Curious George, has scored the lead in the film based on the Pulitzer-prizewinning comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces and will be Darrin to, as ridiculous as the following may sound, Nicole Kidman's Samantha in the Nora Ephron — directed Bewitched. Plus he and his wife Viveca have a kid due in March. "Everyone keeps asking me when I'm going to take a break," he says. "Most people in the world have to work every day."
In fact, his career is moving so fast, he's already prepping his Oscar speech, trying to decide whether it's better to center it on not thanking God (who Ferrell feels is good but gets too many accolades) or on just being so choked up that he never gets to say anything before the music comes on. And finally, in a more realistic vein, he's even attempting the Tom Hanks leap to a dramatic film in next year's Winter Passing, written and directed by playwright Adam Rapp. "Then I'm going straight to old men," he jokes. "I'm doing Horse Whisperer 2. And a remake of On Golden Pond." The man will not rest until Melrose Larry Green recognizes him.
- Joel Stein/Los Angeles