What is Will
Ferrell’s secret?
Critic Elvis
Mitchell told NPR that “unlike a lot of other Saturday Night
Live people who basically come in and try to dominate a
piece of material, he’s a real listener. He’s paying attention
to the other actors in the scene, so it becomes partially his
reaction to the other characters, and he’s basically staying in
character, not turning to the camera, winking, not making us
aware that he’s just joking around. He takes the material and
the roles incredibly seriously, so we find that even in
something bizarre and outre, he creates a sense of reality to go
along with it, which is actually a rarity in comic actors these
days.”
True, but as
every Saturday Night Live fan knows, Ferrell also has
“more cowbell.”
“The cowbell
sketch, I’d written early in the first half of the year,”
Ferrell recalls. “It just didn’t get picked for whatever
reason.” The sketch, performed on
April 8, 2000, is a takeoff on VH1's Behind the Music,
purportedly taking us into the recording studio where Blue
Oyster Cult laid down the tracks for “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”
Christopher Walken plays Bruce Dickinson, a fictional music
producer, who demands “more cowbell” from Ferrell’s equally
fictional Gene Frenkle, much to the annoyance of his bandmates.
“Guess what?”
Dickinson exclaims. “I got a fever, and the only prescription is
. . . more cowbell!”
Frenkle says,
“I’d be doing myself a disservice, and everybody in this band,
if I don’t play the hell out of this.” And play the hell out of
it he did, in one of the long running show’s funniest moments.
In the special, Saturday Night Live: 101 Most Unforgettable
Moments, Ferrell’s cowbell sketch was ranked number five.
Despite an
Oscar for his role in The Deer Hunter and appearances in
more than 100 movies, including classics like Pulp Fiction,
Walken’s tombstone may have to make room for “more cowbell.”
“I hear about
it everywhere I go,” he says. “It’s been years and all anybody
brings up is cowbell. I guess you never know what’s gonna
click.”
Arguably,
Ferrell has clicked more successfully than any previous member
of the Saturday Night Live cast, no mean feat considering
the number of talented players who have passed through the NBC
studios since the program debuted in 1975. Upon joining the cast
in 1995, when Saturday Night Live began its 21st
season, Ferrell rather quickly established himself as the show’s
utility man, a versatile performer in the mold of Dan Ackroyd
and, later, Phil Hartman. Though Ackroyd and Hartman both went
on to varying degrees of success in movies and television,
Ackroyd always seemed overshadowed by John Belushi, and later
ceded center stage to Bill Murray, while Hartman career never
reached the same dizzying heights as Mike Meyers.
Ferrell has
had no such problem. Even as he became such real life figures as
Alex Trebek, George W. Bush, Inside the Actor’s Studio
host James Lipton, and singers Neil Diamond and Robert Goulet,
Ferrell’s persona always peeked through, as it also did when
creating characters from scratch, like Spartan cheerleader Craig
Buchanan or Morning Latte host Tom Wilkins.
“It was a
gradual rise that started on SNL,” he remembers. “I went
from being the guy who did the cheerleading thing, to the guy
who plays the president to, ‘Hey, that’s Will Ferrell!’”
The
stereotyped image of the comic is often of a man who’s laughing
on the outside, but otherwise crying on his psychiatrist’s
couch. But, Ferrell says, “I’m no tortured, anger-stoked, deeply
neurotic comic. Just a pretty low-key normal guy.”
He was born
John William Farrell on July 16, 1967 in Irvine, California. He
gives credit for his humor to the environment in which he was
raised. “I attribute it to growing up in safe, boring suburbia
in
California.
. . My main form of entertainment was cracking my friends up and
exploring new ways of being funny. . . Maybe that’s where the
comedy comes from, as some sort of reaction to the safe, boring
suburbs. Although, I gotta say, I never had any resentment of
the place. I loved the suburbs.”
Although his
mother was a teacher, his father was a musician who supplied
accompaniment for those kings of blue-eyed soul, the Righteous
Brothers, so Farrell’s family life may not have been quite as
boring as he made it out to be. After attending Turtle Rock
Elementary School and Rancho San Joaquin Middle School, Ferrell
moved on to University High School. He was a kicker for the
school’s varsity football team and still holds the record for
the most field goals. More significant to his future as a
performer, he made the daily morning announcements over the
school’s PA system, usually disguising his voice for comic
effect.
Moving on to
the University of Southern California, he studied Sports
Broadcasting and graduated with a degree in Sports Information,
and if that isn’t funny enough, he also “would push an overhead
projector across campus with my pants just low enough to show my
butt.” As he says, “I always forced myself to do crazy things in
public.”
That degree
in Sports Information led to a brief internship with NBC Sports,
but after he ad-libbed a joke on air, Ferrell decided that a
career as a sports anchor wasn't the path for him. Soon after,
he joined the Groundlings, the Los Angeles improvisational
comedy troupe that also provided a training ground for such
future SNL cast members as Maya Rudolph, Phil Hartman,
Laraine Newman, Ana Gasteyer, and Jon Lovitz. In 1995, Ferrell
joined Saturday Night Live. It took him awhile to
establish himself. Once he did, however, he became one of the
show’s chief attractions. Whether he was impersonating former
U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno or Jeopardy host Alex
Trebek who had the misfortune of having some of the stupidest,
and rudest celebrity panelists in television history, Ferrell
disproved his own self-deprecating claim that “I have only been
funny about seventy-four percent of the time. Yes, I think that
is right. Seventy-four percent of the time.”
One of
Farrell’s most celebrated impersonations was of President George
W. Bush whom he portrayed as a none-too-bright frat boy,
constantly stumbling over the English language (“victoriant” for
victorious, and “strategery” for strategy), who was in way over
his head as commander-in-chief, and even as Governor of Texas.
Ferrell made
no secret of his dislike for the 43rd president of
the United States and of his preference for Al Gore in the 2000
election. Although he denied being a political person, Ferrell
said, “You shouldn’t have a problem being political, expressing
yourself. It’s funny in the stories and stuff. I don’t know
whether to be unabashed about that or not, but, yeah, I didn’t
vote for him.”
He added that
he “wouldn’t be surprised if (the presidency) is, like, just a
stepping stone on his way to becoming commissioner of baseball.”
When asked about the real life president’s likely reaction to
his impersonation, Ferrell said, “Let’s just say I don’t think
I’ll be going up to
Kennebunkport.”
NBC knew what
they had, and in 2001, desperate to keep Ferrell on board, paid
him a salary of $350,000 a year, making him the highest paid
cast member in Saturday Night Live’s history.
During his
time on Saturday Night Live, he started making
appearances on the big screen, turning up in such films as
Boat Trip, A Night at the Roxbury, the first two
Austin Powers movies, Dick, Zoolander, and
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
The first
genuine “Will Ferrell movie” came in 2003 with Old School,
a sort of unofficial nod to Animal House. It was followed
that Christmas by Elf, which proved his box-office appeal
with a mammoth $173 million gross. “I thought it would be
stupid, clunky, and obvious,” Roger Ebert wrote in
The Chicago Sun-Times, but instead discovered it to be “one
of those rare Christmas comedies that has a heart, a brain, and
a wicked sense of humor, and it charms the socks right off the
mantelpiece.”
He took a
break from the mainstream to add a little art house prestige to
his resume by appearing in Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda.
“I loved the structure of the whole movie,” he said, “these two
parallel stories which were illustrating the point of the fine
line between comedy and tragedy. It was so imaginative and
unique, but at the same time very signature Woody Allen.”
His college
training as a sports anchor may have come in handy for
Anchorman in which he embodied the kind of self-important,
blow-dried news anchor so prominent on local television during
the ‘70s. “Potent as a character actor,” The Village Voice
intoned, “impressive if fatiguing as the lead, Will Ferrell
possesses a comic gift that’s as linguistic as much as
physical.”
Talladegga
Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,
in which he played a NASCAR driver, was another big hit. “I
don’t know if there’s one individual driver,” Ferrell said when
asked about the inspiration for his character. “Ricky is kinda
all the drivers and none of them all at the same time. He kinda
just came out of my brain which is a pretty messed up place.”
Reviewing the
film for The Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan thought the
results were a bit of a mess, too, “but it is a genial mess, and
one that will make you laugh. Which is the whole idea.”
Proof of his
star power was the fact that Oscar winners Dustin Hoffman and
Emma Thompson agreed to accept supporting roles in Stranger
Than Fiction, a 2006 comedy that cast Ferrell as Harold
Crick, an
IRS
agent who realizes his life is being written by an author whose
narration he hears in his head. “(Ferrell) puts that slightly
cross-eyed, perpetually flummoxed look to good use here,”
Stephanie Zacharek wrote at Salon.com, “making us feel some
sympathy for Harold even when he’s being a complete tool.”
More movies
followed - Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, and Step
Brothers, among others, all of them made to order for
Ferrell’s goofy charm, but the inflated comic fantasy, Land
of the Lost, had a title that aptly described everyone
associated with it. Roger Ebert liked it (“a seriously deranged
movie”), but not many others did, and the film laid a colossal
egg at the box-office.
Much more
memorable was Ferrell’s appearance on the final episode of
The Tonight Show with Conan O’ Brien, where he led everyone,
the carrot-topped host included, in a sentimental, laugh-free
version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird.”
After the
failure of Land of the Lost, some critics were prepared
to write Ferrell off as a star with limited staying power. But
with The Other Guys, Ferrell’s career seems to have
gotten back on track. As a forensic accountant content to be
stuck behind a desk, Ferrell co-stars with Mark Wahlberg, a
detective used to action with whom he teams up. Ferrell admits
to identifying with his character.
“I probably
would have been the guy who was, like, ‘Hey, this office work
needs to be done,’” he said. “That’s where the glory is. Why
would you want to risk being shot at out in the field when you
can actually get this legitimate, crucial work done?”
The film
proved to have the second biggest opening of any Ferrell film to
date, and also enjoyed acclaim from the critics.
In his review
for NPR,
New York
critic David Edelstein offered a concise explanation for
Ferrell’s appeal. “What makes Will Ferrell such a treasure,” he
said, “is that for all the lowbrow gags, he doesn’t satirize
stupidity. He satirizes fear: the lengths to which men will go
to keep from looking vulnerable.”
As for
Ferrell himself, he says, “I would love to become like Bill
Murray, who was so funny on Saturday Night Live and has
gone on to do some of the landmark comedies people like, and
then to add this whole other phase to his career with Lost in
Translation and Rushmore. I always felt to be able to
have something similar to that would be great.”
At least in
one respect, Ferrell has Murray beat. You know he could still
play the hell out of that cowbell.
--by
Brian
W. Fairbanks