Researching His Role in Talladega Nights: “We had a NASCAR representative with us the whole time. He would feed us stories. He was an older guy who’d been with the sport [for a long time]. He would tell us stories like, ‘I remember when – John, it was amazing – we were in Gainesville, Florida, I believe it was. And the cars had not shown up. We had no cars for this race. So I went down to the local rent-a-car and I said I need seven cars. And then they took them and painted them with like temporary paint and colors and ran a race with like seven rental cars. When the cars got banged up, they just quickly fixed them and returned them and ran out of the office before [anyone knew].’ This guy was like, every day would be another story like that. ‘I remember when so-and-so stole a police car…’ All this crazy stuff. That guy was a wealth of information.
We had some books and stuff that had pictures. I’ll say this: facial hair was a lot more popular in the early days of NASCAR. I think that’s where I started thinking that I should go back to the old days, because I really wanted that mustache. That was like my first touchstone for that character – that magnificent mustache.”
Taking a Few Spins Around the Track: Reilly was hands-down the best driver of the cast and joked that he got his car up to 210 on the track. “I think part of it was I had been around those cars and stuff,” explained Reilly. “I knew that if you basically did what you were told, that you wouldn’t die. Having done Days of Thunder… I took a rental car actually around the Daytona 500 track. That was an experience in and of itself. It didn’t feel safe at all. It feels much safer in the race car than in the regular car, because the race cars are set on an angle slightly so that when you go in the turn it feels a little more smooth. Like a regular car, when you’re going into the turn it looks like you’re heading into a wall. It looks like you’re heading into an asphalt wall.”
Reilly admits it was tough to go back to driving at the normal speed. “Yeah, after doing that it was. You have to like remind yourself: ‘Oh wait. Wait.’ I would imagine even from watching the races on days that I wasn’t driving, the days when I would just go to the races and watched those cars, it’s definitely infectious. You get out of there and you’re like [making an engine revving sound] when you pull out your car. You have to constantly remind yourself. It takes a couple days to wear off.”
John C Reilly on Adam McKay’s Style of Directing: “Every movie’s different, you know? It really is. The director sets the tone for the way we’re all going to work. I just did a movie with Mike White – who is also a writer – and his take was like, ‘This is what I wrote and this is what we’re going to do. This is what I figure would be best for this scene.’ And that was also a comedy, just a different style.
In some ways filmmaking is different from set to set, but it’s also completely different depending on the personality of the director. On one hand, this felt kind of very unstructured and loose and kind of crazy. Like, ‘Oh my god, what are we doing? This is nuts.’ On the other hand, I felt like I was in really good hands with Adam and Will. They’re such close friends and they have really strong ideas about they think is funny and what makes them laugh. Adam’s thing was like, ‘Look, it’s just a democracy here and the democracy goes like this: best idea wins. It’s not like because I’m the director, you guys have to accept my idea. If we’re standing around talking and we’re joking around trying to find out what would be funny to do in a certain moment, if someone says something and everyone laughs, that’s it. That’s the idea.’ They’re not going to argue with an honest reaction.”
Reilly continued, “The first couple of weeks it was little like, ‘Wow, here I am in a big comedy, working every day.’ It was different, but I loved it. Honestly though, it didn’t feel a lot different. The acting part didn’t feel a lot different to me. I think doing comedy and drama is kind of the same, in terms of what you bring to it as an actor. You’re still trying to be as honest as you can be with the character and do the material as straightforward as possible. But in comedy the situation is absurd. It’s almost like the more you commit to it in a serious way, the funnier it gets. That’s definitely Adam and Will’s take on things. They’re not big on [making a drum sound] kind of punch line stuff. It’s more character-based. I always thought that about Will, even when I first saw him on Saturday Night Live. I thought, ‘That guy’s an actor.’ Some of the people on the show are stand-up comics or improv Olympians or whatever you want to call it, but Will’s an actor. He approaches it in the same way that the more serious actors do.”
