Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly: Step-Brothers!
If you couldn't believe how hilarious actor Will Ferrell and his real-life buddy actor John C. Reilly were in Talladega Nights, you'll get a kick out of the two guys behaving like pissed-off teens in the sibling rivalry comedy Step-Brothers. If you are in a "blended family" you'll probably even relate to some of their crazy hijinks. [Note: be prepared for some Superbad-like R-rated dialogue and jokes].
Story goes: Brennan Huff (Will) is a 30-something guy who is only occasionally employed and lives with his mom Nancy (Mary Steenbergen). When Nancy marries Robert, his son Dale (John), also a middle-aged live-at-home slacker, goes ballistic when Will moves into his house as his new step-brother. These two immature boy/men tear the family apart but finally reach a middle ground and agree to pull some crazy stunts to bring mom and dad back together. On the way, they just might learn how to grow up and move out!
We had a crazy sit-down with the two funnydudes in Beverly Hills recently and found them to be as silly and creative as ever. Will entered the room carrying a salad he grabbed off a near-by buffet table.
Will: If you feel hungry during this time, you can grab handfuls. It's my famous Kansas City Chopped Salad. I'm coming out with a cookbook, mostly on salads. It's a terrible cookbook, actually.
TeenHollywood: Uh, okay, thanks.
John: We're excited about the movie!
TeenHollywood: Good! Let's talk about that. Do you have siblings and what did you do to them when you were growing up?
John: I do have brothers and sisters and a lot of things depicted in the movie are things that happened or I witnessed.
Ferrell: The drum set right? [John's character won't let Will even touch his cherished drum set].
John: The drum set was one of them, yeah. Although I haven't talked to my brother yet about it (laughs). I have to get around to that. I was accused of nicking drumsticks. Things were touched when he wasn't there, but it never turned into the brawl in the front (yard) with the hose on us [like in the film].
TeenHollywood: John, do you actually play drums?
John: Only my brother's when he wasn't home. I learned to play the drums for a movie called Georgia years ago. And I've kept up with different musical endeavors. I can't play the drums as muscularly as Dale [his character] does.
TeenHollywood: Will was that you singing at the end? It was pretty great.
Ferrell: That's 100 percent my voice, thank you [we don't know if he's kidding or not]. It just kind of came out organically in the story even though John's probably the better singer in real life.
John: Who's counting? You did a beautiful job with the song, Will. I watched you record a version in the studio, so I'm a witness that it was Will. Then we had playback music only and he performed it live on the set.
TeenHollywood: When did you two leave home?
Will: I left home for college, and then I immediately moved back home, and lived at home for three years, so I guess that part is taken from my own life. I think kids should move out of the house when they feel ready. For some, that's a 5-year-old child, they're ready. For others it's a 52-year-old man.
John: I was officially allowed to leave when I was 18. But I had a part time job when I was 12, illegally. I was a dishwasher at this Eastern European restaurant on the south side of Chicago. I'd get there 3.30-4 o'clock after school and the whole kitchen would be full of dishes. I was like their little slave. [Okay, now these two are off on a comic riff!] I have a 6-year-old who's got a part time job.
Will: And I have a Korean half-son who's 68-years-old and it's tough to budge him, to wake him up.
John: And you don't speak Korean.
Will: I don't speak Korean. He also suffers from sleep apnea so its very hard to wake him up.
TeenHollywood: How did you two decide to work on this project anyway?
Will: We had so much fun working on Talladega Nights and we really kind of made a blood pact, to work on something else together, and I think it was John who was really the catalyst. He said 'let's really make a concerted effort'. You work on films with people, you have fun experiences, and then you say 'let's do it again' and it slips through your fingers, so we really made a point to sit down and meet. I think we had a couple of dinners where we threw out a bunch of different ideas and had some really good ones.
TeenHollywood: Who came up with this particular story?
Will: It was [director] Adam [McKay] who called both of us the next day and said, 'I just thought of this other thing. What if you guys are two 40-year-old guys who live with your single parent? They meet each other, get married and you're forced to be stepbrothers'. We both were like, 'that's the idea!'.
TeenHollywood: You two are famous for ad-libbing some of the best lines in movies. Did you ad-lib on set a lot here?
Will: Adam and I honed [the story] into the actual working script. But, it was the usual mix. Adam's one of the few directors where we do the take once and then we begin improvising whether we want to or not. It's unusual because most directors have you work on the scene until you have it down or maybe you do an extra take, just for fun. We almost invert it and start exploring things...
John: Things that really shouldn't be explored.
Will: But it's great! You get in a rhythm of doing that so it's a combination. We definitely like what we wrote and then we feel that anything we can discover is just icing on the cake. We improvise a lot in the writing process so even our written scenes have a back and forth feel that make it seem improvised.
John: Sometimes you'll do a film and you'll improvise something funnier than what is in the script [because] it's just a weakly- written scene. But with these guys [Will and Adam], the script is always really, really funny. It's kind of sad to move away because it's so good.
Will: Hey! There's still a lot of salad here. No one's touched it.
TeenHollywood: Maybe later. Now, this is R-rated. Did you just not want to go for PG-13?
John: We wanted to be able to make swears. It wasn't like we were deliberately trying to be R-rated. We just didn't want to have constraints. We know how creative it gets when you start improvising and coming up with ideas. We just wanted to feel like it could be anything we wanted it to be.
TeenHollywood: The guys in the film are surrounded by a lot of their childhood toys. Do you have anything from childhood that you couldn't part with?
Will: [to John] Don't you have a petrified bowl of macaroni-and-cheese?
John: Uh-huh.
TeenHollywood: Okay, no straight answers from you two. Can you talk about the retro tee-shirts you wear in the movie?
John: We looked at a lot of them. You want to do retro-seeming t-shirts, like these are the t-shirts they've been wearing since that time. But the fashion now is to have old-looking t-shirts and we didn't want it to look hipster-ish. So [the costume designer] ended up custom-making a lot of stuff. So those pajama bottoms for Will were made out of Star Wars sheets.
TeenHollywood: There is one scene where some little kids just gang up and beat you up. What was that like?
Will: Humiliating.
John: They have sharp little nails! They're heavier than they look.
Ferrell: They're not afraid to bite you when the cameras not rolling.
TeenHollywood: You guys also fight each other. It looks pretty rough. Did anyone get hurt?
Will: We got pretty banged up. That fight in the front yard was all done within the first two weeks of straight fighting to start the movie.
John: Getting buried alive, fighting. It was all fun.
Will: Attack dogs. It was pretty physical.
TeenHollywood: The two step-bros make this ridiculous "Boats and Hos" music video to sell products. Why go there?
Will: It's the perfect example of what they think would sell or be a good idea.
John: When we were deciding what their first video would be like it had to be something that would make their parents go 'oh God!' It was about picking something that was as inappropriate as possible.
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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.
