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| Steve Carell, fake news personality, in Anchorman. |
Will Ferrell stars as a seventies
television news anchor in this slapsticky comedy,
opposite Christina Applegate, Steve Carell, and Paul
Rudd. Former SNL writer Adam McKay directs.
(See box.) (1 hr. 31 mins.; PG-13)
— LOGAN HILL AND BILGE EBIRI
Spotlight: Steve Carell
“I’m essentially a whore,” says
Steve Carell, a comic veteran of Second City
who’s best known for his work on The Daily
Show. “I’ll do anything anybody is
going to pay me to do.” And despite being hired
to play another fake newsman in the Will Ferrell
vehicle Anchorman, he says he’s not
worried about typecasting because “I honestly
don’t think people are tracking my career that
closely.” While Carell admires the sharp rise of
Ferrell, he explains, “I’m not striving
for that kind of success—I’m just hoping
to be employed, and I don’t really have any
aspirations beyond that.” Despite his purported
lack of ambition, Carell’s already filmed a
pilot for the NBC adaptation of the superb BBC comedy
The Office (which should debut sometime this
winter), and he’s writing a script for his own
film. (“It’s about a 40-year-old guy
who’s never had sex.”) His new projects
may have something to do with a repressed desire to
break out of the fake-news niche (“I only want
to play newspeople for the rest of my life,” he
deadpans). In this sense, he adds, he is not unlike
Alec Guinness, “who said he didn’t want
Obi-Wan to be his legacy—and that’s
probably the most inappropriate comparison
ever.” But he is proud of his work in
Anchorman, which pits gangs of polyester-clad
news anchors against one another in a slapstick battle
royale. “This film has no great cultural
significance,” he brags. “There’s no
lesson to be learned. There’s no heart.
The only thing it wants to do is to make people laugh,
and in that sense, it’s unrelenting.”
Opens July 9
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