interview - STEVE CARELL
Who’s Who
Steve Carell provides the voice of the most important Who of them all, the Mayor of Who-ville, in Horton Hears a Who! But, quite frankly, the much-in-demand actor is still a little shocked he’s an actor at all
By Jim Slotek
The Hollywood trade papers painted it as something of a reunion when Jim Carrey and Steve Carell were cast as the lead voices in Horton Hears a Who!, the CGI adaptation of the Dr. Seuss classic.
They had played opposite each other in Bruce Almighty, with Carrey as God’s vessel Bruce and Carell as Bruce’s office rival Evan. And Carell — an A-lister after the success of his romantic-comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin — inherited the less-successful sequel, Evan Almighty.
So it’s ironic (but not surprising given how animated films are made) that while Carrey and Carell’s characters share plenty of screen time, the actors never even saw each other while making the movie about an elephant who encounters an entire race of tiny people living on a speck of dust.
“I never saw Jim Carrey once,” says Carell during an L.A. interview last November, just as his work on Horton was drawing to a close. “But I still have a few more sessions to do, so we might just run into each other, you never know. I must say it’s looking really cool. They really captured that Dr. Seuss look, but at the same time it’s very three-dimensional and feels alive. It’s going to look good.”
Of course, Seuss fans know that the titular Horton and Carell’s character, the microscopic Mayor of tiny Who-ville, inhabit separate worlds on screen. Having discovered a world of people literally at his feet (“We are HERE! We are HERE! We are HERE!”), Horton is treated like a lunatic by his fellow pachyderms.
Meanwhile, the Mayor is similarly disbelieved — even by his own wife (Amy Poehler) — when he first spreads the news that their entire universe is in danger of being crushed by elephants.
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Steve Carell and his Horton Hears a Who! character, the Mayor of Who-ville
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“He’s kind of an insecure mayor, given the circumstances,” Carell
says, “I play him with kind of a heightened version of my own voice.”
Tom Shadyac, the director of both Almightys,
has suggested that Carrey and Carell inhabit different worlds
comedically as well. Carrey, he says, is a consummately proactive comic
actor whose characters control the action. Carell, meanwhile, is
wonderfully reactive, playing best when things happen to him, his
deadpan face communicating an absurd comic sadness.
That theory certainly seems to apply to Carell’s best movie work, including Little Miss Sunshine, where he plays a suicidal academic confined to a van on a dysfunctional family road trip, or Dan in Real Life,
where he’s a lovelorn single dad, trapped at a raucous family reunion,
suffering in silence — but sporadically acting out in comic angst — as
the woman he loves clings to his brother’s arm.
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And, of course, in his breakthrough movie
The 40-Year-Old Virgin he’s a guy who’s spent the best years of his life waiting for sex to happen to him. (Although, as an exception that proves the rule, Michael Scott, his Golden Globe-winning character on
The Office, is definitely the clueless, klutzy straw that stirs the drink.)
And to hear Carell tell it, his career kind of “just happened” to him as well.
“I’ve way, way overshot my target,” he says, “this target didn’t exist. “In fact, there was absolutely nothing in my upbringing that would have pointed me to a career as an actor. My family was not predisposed to the arts, frankly. My one brother is an architect, one’s an engineer, the other was a professional chef and now owns a landscape company.”
As for Carell, he was supposed to be a lawyer, all the way from his childhood in Concord, N.H., to Ohio’s Denison University, where the acting bug first bit him. “It was just something I enjoyed doing. I never considered it a potential vocation. I thought it was just a fun hobby and extracurricular activity,” he says.
After a career crisis, and a stint as a postal worker, he took a flyer and moved to Chicago in the late 1980s, enrolling in classes with that city’s much storied Second City troupe.
Second City seemed, to Carell, to be where he belonged. He made lifelong friends among the cast, including best friend Stephen Colbert, now of The Colbert Report. He quickly made his way up the ranks, from Second City’s touring company to its mainstage troupe to a gig as an improv instructor. Among his students: a talented young comic actor named Nancy Walls who would become his wife and the mother of their two children. (Fans of The Office will recognize Walls as Carol Stills, Michael Scott’s real estate agent and sort-of girlfriend for five episodes early in the series.)
“It was like the graduate school of comedy. I just found it a place where I could fail miserably night after night and there were no implications. That’s a very freeing experience and you learn a lot. We tried everything, the most outlandish characters, we’d write things that were political and satirical. The AIDS epidemic was new and we did a montage about AIDS that, in retrospect, was very heavy-handed and preachy, but it was dangerous at the time and taboo and it was okay to try. Everything was an experiment.
“I think it also helped shape my comedy in that I became attracted to characters who weren’t self-aware, who didn’t know they were funny.”
It was idyllic, but temporary. Colbert moved to New York to join the short-lived The Dana Carvey Show as a writer, and Walls nailed an audition to become a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Rejected after his own SNL audition, Carell moved to New York to be with her, and joined Colbert as a writer for Carvey.
Eventually, the lives of all three would intersect again when they were hired as writer/correspondents on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 1999. “It was Stephen who got me on The Daily Show,” Carell says. “We’d done all that work together and they were looking for correspondents and he threw my name in the hat. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
Carell was a standout on The Daily Show for six years and more than 350 episodes (often sharing “reports” and regular features with his wife) before finally leaving to take up the movie and TV offers that had been coming his way. It was, he says, a heavy-hearted decision.
“I felt enormous trepidation leaving The Daily Show,” he says. “They’d been so good to me the entire time I was there. So I kept the door open because I wasn’t sure how these other things would pan out. If things hadn’t worked out, I was assured I could have gone back. It was like home.”
Instead, he came back a star — a featured interview guest on the eve of the release of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. “It was very cool to come back,” he says of that night. “I owe so much to Jon and to that show, it was like coming back to family. I have a real affection for those people.”
From his 2007-2008 release schedule (Evan Almighty, Dan in Real Life, Horton Hears a Who! and the upcoming Get Smart, a movie remake of the ’60s sitcom in which Carell plays Agent 86 opposite Anne Hathaway as Agent 99), you might conclude Carell is a workaholic.
But unlike many actors who approached the season-of-the-strike by trying to fit in as much work in the first half of ’08 as possible, Carell says he deliberately said no to anything new until the labour situation blew over.
“My wife’s like, ‘Bring it on baby, bring on the strike!’ Whatever happens, we’ll probably go back to Massachusetts and hang out for the summer,” he says of an ’08 tentatively dedicated to rest and recreation.
In fact, there may soon be a Carell-free period on the screen irrespective of the labour situation. When Walls put her own career on hold for the children, it was with the proviso that the situation would eventually reverse itself, with Carell playing Mr. Mom. “We’ve talked about that, she’s been getting calls too. She doesn’t want to do anything right now. We’ve got a First Grader and a preschooler, but it’s definitely something we’ve discussed.
“She’s been getting a lot of calls and interest for auditions and parts. She’s been turning them down of her own choosing. But she knows I’m happy to [be a househusband] when she’s ready, and it’ll probably happen.”
Jim Slotek writes about movies for the Toronto Sun.