Word: talladega
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...intended for Ben Stiller, but Stiller, who is a producer on Blades of Glory, which opens nationwide March 30, backed out because he felt the role was too similar to ones he had played before. Ferrell had no such qualms even though he has made lots of sports movies (Talladega Nights, Kicking & Screaming and Semi-Pro, a basketball comedy shooting in Los Angeles and set for release in 2008) and is Hollywood's active leader in self-humiliation. Is there a person in the English-speaking world who hasn't marveled at the topography of his naked torso? "I heard...
...looks like an idiot," he says--he has reduced movie stardom to a series of unpretentious, unthinking decisions. "Will's stand is, If it's good and it makes us laugh, I'm doing it," says Adam McKay, Ferrell's co-writer and director on Anchorman and Talladega Nights. Judd Apatow, director of The 40-Year Old Virgin and a producer on three Ferrell films, says, "Most comedians are neurotic and needy, but Will is unique in that his process isn't fueled by suffering. He's just this lovely guy who does what he likes...
What keeps Ferrell on the mainstream side of the Andy Kaufman line is that the audience is rarely the butt of the joke. Even in Talladega Nights--in which he plays a moronic, Southern-accented titan of the NASCAR circuit--the joke isn't that people follow racing or idolize a doofus but that Ricky Bobby is oblivious to everything around him. "It's easy to take a shot at people, set yourself aside from it and say, Hey, look how stupid everybody is," says Will Arnett, the former Arrested Development star who plays Poehler's brother and evil skating...
...ripped, more rippled. In comedic terms, exposing himself is a near Christian act of self-sacrifice. "I don't think anybody believes me, but I try not to be gratuitous about it," says Ferrell, who streaked in Old School, ran around a speedway in his underwear in Talladega, was a shirtless Bible salesman on SNL, worked out bare chested in his office in Anchorman and ... you get the point. "In Blades we do a thing where I tell the story of my life"--wearing only a towel--"with my tattoos, but that's for story purposes." He's laughing...
...think offhand of one who could. Lesbians simply don't inspire the kind of social-sexual unease that gay men do. Two chicks kissing is a male fantasy, a sweeps stunt. Two dudes kissing is gross-out humor. It's Sacha Baron Cohen open-mouthing Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights. It's a million Brokeback Mountain jokes. It's the Snickers Super Bowl ad, in which two mechanics locked lips while sharing a candy bar. (Or, as Freud might have said, a "candy bar.") Even in post-- Queer Eye pop culture, lesbians can choose lovers; gay men can choose drapes...