Will Ferrell and Andre 3000 Turn "Semi-Pro"

What crazy stunt won't Will Ferrell perform? He's ice skated, driven race cars, streaked down the street in the buff... geez. With his role as Jackie Moon, a basketball player/team owner in the 1970's spoof sports comedy Semi-Pro, the popular comic actor conquers yet another physical arena and this time, he takes actor/musical artist Andre Benjamin (Andre 3000 of Outkast) along with him!

We sat down with these two silly guys in Beverly Hills a couple of weeks ago. Will had on a black track suit with orange stripes and Andre, famous for his style, wore a beige Henley shirt, gray fedora and classy silver bling. Both were letting fly with the crazy quips and were rarely serious so we obliged with some "out there" questions....

TeenHollywood: Will, we have seen you ice-skating in Blades of Glory and driving racecars in Talladega Nights. How hard was it to shape that beautiful body of yours into a basketball physique for this film?

Will: Well I pretty much stereotypically have a basketball physique to begin with. So, it didn't take that much sculpting. I hear some laughter over here (he leans toward Andre). I don't know why. Jackie Moon is a player from a different era when players were a little more voluptuous. He's a voluptuous player. Curvy.

TeenHollywood: [we're trying not to laugh]Do you guys each have a favorite professional basketball team?

Andre: To be honest, it sounds crazy, but I'm not a big basketball fan. I'm more of a football fan. So, I don't know anything about who is good right now. I'm from Atlanta. But the Hawks are playing pretty good right now. They need new uniforms, but they are alright.

Will: I am a Laker fan. Born and raised in Southern California, right here. And we just made the deal of the season. We just got Paul Gasol from the Memphis Grizzles.

TeenHollywood: Was there a great deal of improvisation in this film, Will?

Will: We'd start filming the scenes as written and then slowly throw some zingers in there. I really try to change it up whenever I can in my personal life.

TeenHollywood Was that easy for you Andre?

Andre: I wasn't too intimidated. When I had to audition for the film, I had to walk into a room and audition with Will. So I guess once I got over that it wasn't too bad. With music you freestyle a lot and you kinda just throw ideas out. When you read the script and want to make your character as real as possible, sometimes you just go off on a tangent and you keep going. You've got film? Why not? So keep recording it.

TeenHollywood: Gotta comment on the wardrobe. Man, those basketball shorts were really short back in the 1970's. Any short short accidents?

Will: I think Andre and I had the shortest shorts, which a lot of our fellow teammates refused to wear.

Andre: And they kept pulling them down. Actually we had to do two weeks of basketball training, so I went ahead and got it over with and I wore my shorts during the two weeks of practicing.

Will: That's how dedicated Andre was.

Andre: So, I wouldn't feel self conscious the day we were shooting, so I wouldn't feel funny because [his character] Clarence didn't care about the shorts, so why should I?

Will: But, I did have to wear a special pair of underwear, because when I went into a defensive stance...there was a potential for things to happen.

TeenHollywood: There are some really funny scenes in this film. Which was the most fun for you?

Will: Luckily it's hard to say. It's hard to pick one. If I had to pick one right now, it would probably be the Russian roulette poker scene, just because that was insane. We had a good time. That was fun.

TeenHollywood: Were they real bullets?

Will: No, not until the last take and the prop man thought it would be funny to sneak in a real bullet. (Laughs.) It turns out he wasn't a real prop guy. He was just on the stage that day and it turns out he had done it before.

TeenHollywood : Andre you are a clothing designer, actor and musician. How do you balance all those different careers? And what motivates so much artistic divergence?

Andre: It's really whatever is really going on at the time. I check which way the wind is blowing. And I guess what drives it is just creativity. I just like to make stuff. And if at the end of the day I can have something in my head and actually see it be produced, y'know, come to an end point, that's the joy of it. It's all creative-based. As long as I can be creating something or do something that can be cool, I'm good.

TeenHollywood: You guys both have big "Fros" in the film and wild costumes. When you saw yourself in the costumes and hair and makeup, what did you think?

Will: I felt completely at home. No, in looking at a lot of the reference photos of the league and the period it obviously looks funny, but it's not that far from the truth. So, I love the fact that it really is sort of historically accurate and humorous looking all at the same time.

TeenHollywood: Would you be caught dead in anything you wore in the movie?

Will: Y'know what? I might start wearing neckerchiefs now in my personal life. I think that's a nice piece of accoutrement and it covers the neck if you have any unsightly blemishes or a weird Adam's apple.

TeenHollywood: Andre, what did you think of the' 70s fashions in this movie? Did you keep the coat?

Andre: I thought they were pretty outrageous. You don't get a chance to walk around in those clothes everyday. Film is your chance to go back to that time. The '70s style is what it is. A lot of the stuff wouldn't work right now. No, I didn't keep the coat; the material was hideous. It was in good shape though.

TeenHollywood: Was that your hair in a big "Fro"?

Andre: Mine was a wig. But I used to have hair that big. I was supposed to get a wig (to keep) but they tricked me. I told them I wanted to keep it but they took it.

TeenHollywood: Will, what did you think of your hairdo? And, did Andre help you with the song that was supposed to be Jackie's hit?

Will: I think Jackie would have loved to have had the means to pay for a $500 haircut. There's no way he could afford it. He probably primped a fair amount. In terms of the song (Andre) flatly refused (to help me). No, that was the work of Scott Armstrong, a little bit of myself and [director] Kent [Alterman] and Niles Rogers.

TeenHollywood: How did your poor director manage to control all of the funny improv actors in the film?

Will: Yeah, Kent had the kind of unenviable task of herding all of us. Because you've got ten guys on a basketball court and about 1,800 extras and every time he yelled 'cut' we'd want to just start shooting the ball around and running around and doing bits at the scorers table. So, yeah, it was tough.

TeenHollywood: You have to wrestle a bear, Will. Who was controlling the bear?

Will: Who herded the bear? Uh, y'know, we did something unusual that's never been done before. We went wild. There was no bear trainer. We captured a bear. That's why this was a 9-month shoot. Six of those months we had to trap a bear up in the Sierra Nevada's. The first one wasn't big enough, we didn't like it so I think we released it in Burbank somewhere. And we finally found our hero bear and that day we just rolled film and just let it do its thing.

TeenHollywood: Yikes! This soundtrack has some funky tunes from the '70's on it. What is your fave party song?

Andre: Favorite party song. This may sound really corny, but Cyndi Lauper, 'Girls Just Want to Have fun.' (Laughs.) It's a great pop song. I mean, I don't dance around singing it, but the production is like the best.

Will: Yeah. 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' by Cyndi Lauper. I also love 'Hava Nagilla' anytime I hear it.

TeenHollywood: Great choices. Okay guys, I understand that some of you went to a basketball camp for this, who was really the best player?

Andre: Woody Harrelson

Will: I heard him saying he started out excellent and got better.

TeenHollywood: Will, you've made a lot of movies with sports themes. Is that intentional on your part or they just come along?

Will: This is actually just coincidence that these movies lined up the way they did. I love combining sports and comedy together, but only one of those was my idea that was the NASCAR movie. Otherwise I was asked to be a part of these. It's a great framework to do comedy in. You can parody the sport, in this movie you can parody the era. And at the same time, you have a built in arc that's fun for the audience to watch this team of losers try to attain the lofty goal of.... fourth place.

TeenHollywood: What other era in history would be good for a comedy film?

Will: I'd love to make fun of the future. Some sort of space travel movie where pogos are the main form of transportation. I'm an amateur futurist, yes.

TeenHollywood: Was anyone injured during the shoot?

Will: I faked several [injuries]. I actually faked an appendectomy at one point to get out of filming. Just to let you know.

TeenHollywood: In the movie, Jackie's motto is 'Everyone Love Everyone'. What's your personal motto?

Will: My motto is just try to get out of bed. I just lie there and go (exhaustedly) just get out of bed.

Andre: Mine is 'no matter how bad it looks it's probably going to be better tomorrow'.

TeenHollywood: Very optimistic! Can you talk about your new album?

Andre: I've only written two songs in my head. I haven't even started recording them. I've just been tinkering around. Maybe the release will be this Fall. Who knows?

TeenHollywood: Is there a sport that you feel should be in the Olympics?

Andre: I'm a big football fan so...

Will: Olympic football?

Andre: Yeah, why not? Arena football ain't getting it. I get depressed when football season is over so maybe we need something.

Will: What I'd love to see in the Olympics is opening up the age group to small children. I'd love to see the events done by small children: powerlifting, shotput. Open age class.

TeenHollywood: Okay, we give up. You guys are nutz! Who was the biggest prankster on set?

Andre: We did play a prank on Rasheed. That was the biggest prank.

Will: There was one member of the Tropics, the tallest one, Rasheed, who missed almost an entire day of filming because he didn't think he was needed even though it was a team locker room scene. When he finally showed up, we wrote a two-page monologue for him to do [based on Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.] I started crying I was laughing so hard.

Andre: He had almost no lines throughout the whole movie and he really studied hard. He was trying.

Will: Yeah, he was trying. His hand was shaking with the (script). He maintained that he was in on the joke all along.

TeenHollywood: Did you have any fun just playing basketball?

Will: Yeah. Some of those days we were actually playing the games. We had something like 15 choreographed plays that we had to run and set up because you can't just roll the basketball out there. You've got to concentrate on what the plays are going to be so that you can set up the cameras and everything. Sometimes we'd run the play and they'd say, whatever happens whether you make a basket or not, we're going to have free play for the next three minutes and just literally see what happens. After lunch, I remember I was still digesting a bean burrito or something and went down and had 1,800 people there and made a shot, the crowd went crazy. You felt like a real basketball player.

TeenHollywood: Your character Jackie is an expert at promotional stunts. What was the best or most hideous one you did? Wearing skates and leaping over a bunch of girls? Maybe dressing like a giant sun?

Will: I kinda loved all of them because if you look at what they were doing in the ABA,[American Basketball League] that's how the league survived. They did all these stupid promotions just to get people in. I thought each of them were kind of a funny version of what they did.

TeenHollywood: What's your next project?

Andre: Battle in Seattle with Charlize Theron and Woody [Harrelson] and Michelle Rodriguez. It's about the riots and protests that took place in 1999 in Seattle. That's coming out in April. [I play] a protester by the name of Django, who keeps [making] protesting fun. He keeps it lighthearted.

Will: I have Stepbrothers coming out in July with John C. Reilly.

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