Steve Carell on Identifying With His Character: “I identify with him in the sense that he is trying. He's doing his best to get through life and keep a good aspect and disposition going, keep his hopes up. But I think there is an underlying sadness to the character, which in fact there is to me. I think there's the parallel. I don't know. I think there are elements of who I am in who this guy is, but the specific ones I really don't know."
Steve Carell and Paul Rudd Rate Their Dating Skills: Carell admits he was a ‘bad dater.’ “Up until 8th grade I went to an all boys school. By the time I hit high school I was a bit freaked out about women in general. The ‘putting them on a pedestal’ aspect of the movie, I definitely did that. I was very wary of women, especially in high school. As soon as I went from being a friend and started looking at a woman as a potential love interest, I could not even talk to a woman. I was pretty bad.”
Rudd said he wasn’t much better while in his teens. “…I did buy, my senior year in high school, a Jeep. Tried to give off the appearance like I was kind of cool and I grew my hair long like Michael Hutchence from INXS. I just relied on external things to try and fool girls,” said Rudd.
Researching Real 40 Year Old Virgins: Carell said Universal Pictures gave them case studies to use as research for the film. “Seriously. There are quite a few case studies documenting middle-age virginity. Who these people are, where they live, what are there likes and dislikes? What we found to be the case more often than not is that they are just normal people who, for one reason or another, just never did it. Very similar to how the character at some point just kind of gave up on the whole notion because it was harder to - and every time I say something all these really bad puns start floating into the room - but it was more difficult to keep attempting than to just give up. That's kind of the research that we did.
In terms of meeting any? Not that I know of and that's a hard thing. It's not something you wear on your sleeve. Who knows how many virgins we've met in our life? It sounds like they’re aliens…”
Paul Rudd on Improv vs. the Script: “…As far was what's improvised and what isn't I really don't remember. The way that we would shoot it was not unlike the way we did ‘Anchorman’ a little bit where we would tend to go through the scene one time. Just kind of shoot it one time as scripted and then it was, ‘Alright, now do something different. And that was literally the direction. ‘Okay, do something different.’ So you never really know…
[It was] kind of keeping within the same context of the way it was written, but then changing it all up or adding [something]. And Judd would never cut. We shot a million feet of film, which this is a true thing I didn't even realize. You shoot a million feet of film and the film company will buy champagne for the cast and crew.”
Steve Carell on the Waxing Scene: “That was 100% real. We set up five cameras because we knew there would be one take. There was no way of going back and trying to get it again. So we set up a camera up on the guys, one over me, one specifically on my chest, one on the waxer. It was not scripted. We just had an idea for where it would go.
We hired a woman who was an actress/waxer, which in itself was a little daunting because she wasn't a professional waxer. That was all real. If you watch closely, there's one close up where you can see blood actually beading to the surface. That was not CGI'd.
When I pitched it to Judd I said it really should be for real. It really should be legitimate waxing because I thought to see them laughing at me in pain would be probably the funniest part of the scene. There's this guy thing where it's this sadistic nature that men have to see other men in non-life threatening pain - and especially self-inflicted. Like the whole ball to the nuts, a kick in the nuts. It's just funny. You can't help but laugh at it if you're a guy because you know you're not going to die. To kind of capture that on camera I thought would be really amusing.
It hurt so much. It really did hurt. A lot of the women in the crew, they were aware of what was going to happen and I didn't [know] And they saying, ‘Are you sure you don't want to trim your hair down a little bit? It will hurt less. Can I give you some Advil? I kept saying, ‘No, no, I'm fine.’ I'm fine and then halfway through I was just sweating and thought this was a bad idea.”
PAGE 2: On the Billboards, "Batman" Rumors, and "Get Smart"
