Steve Carell: In Real Life

We know cute actor Steve Carell as a funnyman. Whether it's on TV's "The Office" or as The 40-year-old Virgin or a modern Noah in Evan Almighty. Next summer we'll see him as Max Smart in the TV adaptation film Get Smart. This week, Steve tries on a different hat and it fits him quite well. In the romantic comedy Dan in Real Life, Steve plays an adorable and totally-datable dad raising daughters (two of them teens) without a partner since his wife died. Dan is an advice columnist but isn't so good at taking his own advice. When he meets a great woman (Juliette Binoche) while at a family reunion, things are looking up..until he learns she's his brother's girl!

We sat down in Marina Del Rey, California with Steve recently to learn about this romantic comedy departure for him, what it's like playing a dad with several daughters (he has one much younger daughter in real life) and wazzup with "The Office" and Get Smart. Picture Steve in casual blue stripe shirt, jeans and a brown cord jacket.

TeenHollywood: "The Office" is still hilarious. But, now that you are this big movie star, why do you stay on the show?

Steve: I like the show, I like doing it, there's no reason to leave. I look at it as probably the best work environment I'll ever have. The writing is great, the producers are fantastic, we get the best directors, and the cast to a person are talented and nice, we're all friends. So there's really no reason to leave. I don't get the sense that it's better somewhere else, or doing something else, and I don't have any sort of attitude about TV versus movies.

TeenHollywood: How do you think your "Office" character Michael Scott would handle the character of Dan?

Steve: Well, if Michael Scott was in the role of Dan, for one thing he probably wouldn't be invited to the family weekend, and his daughters -let's face it, he wouldn't have any daughters because no woman would probably have sex with him to procreate. Even Jan would use heavy duty birth control, because I don't think any woman would want to bear the offspring of Michael Scott, it's kind of incomprehensible to me.

TeenHollywood: Yeah, poor guy. How do you identify with Dan in this movie?

Steve: Dan, in my mind, is a guy who is just doing his best to get through, and get by and raise three daughters by himself. He's just someone who has put other people and other things ahead of himself, and he kind of loses a part of himself in the process. That's the element of the movie that I can identify with, and I think a lot of people can. I have two little kids, and I love them more than anything, and I put them ahead of any of my own personal needs but there's a danger there of losing a part of yourself and not taking care of your own needs, which I think can then affect them, because you want to give your kids the best possible version of yourself, and if you don't feel complete and full yourself, then you can't do that for them, and I think that's what this character was going through.

TeenHollywood: I think one of the most attractive things about this film is the very believable dynamic between Dan and his three daughters. How easy or difficult was that to bring off?

Steve: Well, they're really good actresses and it didn't feel too distant to me. I have a six-year-old daughter, and being around a nine, a fifteen and a seventeen year old girl just felt like my life accelerated by a few years, and the fear inherent in that. It's scary to be around these teenagers, who are making that transition between childhood and adulthood and are full of all of these hormones and thoughts and angst, and I can only imagine what it's going to be like for me and my kids.

TeenHollywood: Are you scared of those coming teen years?

Steve: I'm incredibly scared, because you don't want to be overprotective, you want to let them make their own mistakes, and I don't want to wrap them in a cocoon of security, because that's not going to help them either. When they're little kids you worry about them getting hurt physically, when they get older you worry about them getting hurt emotionally. That's going to be hard. They will get hurt emotionally and there's nothing you can do about it. I think that's what the character is going through. Dan doesn't want them to get hurt because he's hurting, he doesn't want them to feel the way he has felt, he wants to protect them, but at a certain point you can't and you have to let them make some bad moves.

TeenHollywood: Sounds like you are a great dad. You are from Massachusetts so was it like going home to shoot back East in Rhode Island?

Steve: It was great. I was only like an hour and fifteen minutes away from my parents' house, so we did a lot of visiting. They came down and spent some time on the set, it was great. And fall in New England is a beautiful place, it was nice. There's a quality to the air and a crispness that made me think a lot about my childhood. It was nice to be back.

TeenHollywood: We hear there is a lot of ad-libbing on 'The Office' but not so much in this film. Correct?

Steve: Yeah. We play around with the script a lot on 'The Office', and didn't so much with this. I was much more like doing a play. When you do a play you don't improvise the lines, you do them as scripted and you rehearse. There were a lot of very big group scenes, and that can be a disaster if you start improvising within a fifteen person scene. So they were scripted to the point to make them look unscripted, you know what I mean? Which I think really speaks to the quality of the writing; they were written in a way that didn't sound written.

TeenHollywood: You have a nice dramatic scene in this where you're singing and playing guitar and your voice starts cracking as you think of sad things. I thought that was very well done, where did you go to get that?

Steve: Thank you. I was just thinking about how bad my voice was, and it just made me cry. No. Well, I think you gain a lot by being with somebody like Juliette, because she's very engaging, and she was off camera. She was always there, as was the rest of the cast. Any time that the camera is not on you or is not on everybody else, everybody else stayed so you could get a sense for what was going on on the other side, and she's incredibly engaging and I think whatever I was feeling was coming through looking at her.

TeenHollywood: You have Get Smart coming up next summer. How did you take on playing a character that was first known on TV?

Steve: I think in the same sense that's what I stepped into with 'The Office', and I approached it the same way. I'm not trying to do an impersonation of Don Adams [the star of TV's 'Get Smart'], I'm not trying to better anything that he did because there's no way that I could. Like I did with Ricky [Gervais, of the Brit version of 'The Office'], I just tried to think about what elements of the character were important and that I could apply to another characterization, and I hope it works. I think fans of the original show [will get] enough of a sense of it to satisfy them while bringing in new fans.

TeenHollywood: We saw you on the set of Get Smart doing a fight scene, was there more action in that movie than you expected?

Steve: Yes, there were a lot more stunts than I expected. I was hanging off the side of planes, I was scaling buildings, I was hanging off of ropes and dangling from wires. Yeah, but it was really fun, I have to say. And again, something I never expected to do.

TeenHollywood: Will we see you as a big action star in the future then?

Steve: Yes, from here on out I'm going to just get incredibly ripped and muscular and I'll just have a big veiny neck, and I will be making that transition probably from action star into porn, that will be the denouement of my career [thank God, he's kidding].

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.