Steve Carell’s Reaction to Seeing the “Virgin” Billboards with His Smiling Face: “Very surreal. I was driving around with my daughter who's four and she kept asking me, ‘Why are you on the signs? Why is your face? You look stupid.’
(Laughing) Actually we drove around. We went to the mall last week. We'd been out of town for a couple of weeks so when we left none of these billboards were up and we came up and they were every 100 yards. I kept pointing them out to my wife, ‘12 o'clock. There's one at 2 o'clock, look at the bus!’ It's strange. It's weird and I love it. Universal is really promoting it. They really seem to be getting behind it. “
Paul Rudd added, “When I first saw it I was just so thrilled that the Universal marketing department absolutely got it right. They never do, marketing departments. You always see the poster and it's like, ‘Oh, they all look the same - no.’ When I first saw the poster of this I couldn't stop laughing. It’s the funniest picture in the world.”
The Freedom of Doing an R Rated Comedy: Carell said, “Universal insisted… Well, just based on the subject matter we felt that it was an R-rated movie. And Universal never blinked at that and in fact asked us to go to earn it – to actually be a hard R. To not pull any punches and to make an R-rated movie and not try to soften it. Just make the movie we want to make.
The objective wasn’t to make it, ‘Oh, let’s try to make this more of an R.’ We just wrote what we thought was the funniest. We wrote for the characters and we wrote for the situations and we didn’t really think about, ‘Well, we have to make this dirtier or less dirty.’ We just wrote it the way we saw it. So it was nice in that [sense]. The freedom, in that sense, that we never felt like we had to censor ourselves.”
Steve Carell on Carrying a Movie: (Laughing) “There was no pressure until you started talking… All the way through shooting it I just kept thinking, ‘If this is the last movie I ever do, this has been great. This has been just fun.’ So I try not to get ahead of myself at all in terms of what the next thing is. I hope I keep working. I’ve been really lucky just to support myself acting. Being able to help create and be the lead in a movie is way beyond any expectation I ever had. So, I’m pretty happy with what has happened so far. And honestly, if this is it, if it all comes crashing down tomorrow, I’m still pretty happy.”
Steve Carell on Upcoming Projects:
The Status of “Get Smart” – Carell says he hasn’t started work on it yet. “They’re still writing it. We have an outline and the next step is to actually script it.”
The Joker Rumor - There’s at least one website reporting that Carell is being considered to play The Joker in the next “Batman” movie. Carell said he just heard that rumor himself. “I’d love to do that, but I doubt that it’s true,” said Carell adding, “So I think that’s probably completely fabricated, but I like…I love the…I love it. I love the rumor. That’s cool.”
