I know you've probably edited this out
so that people can't hear what you just said,
so I'll just repeat what you said
for the people that are watching this right now,
which you said, and correct me if I'm wrong,
Ant-Man is the most powerful, important character
in all of the MCU and the biggest and best Avenger,
is that right?
[Interviewer] It's definitely true.
Well, you said it on me, but I'll go with that.
[upbeat music playing]
[Paul] Anchorman.
It's called Sex Panther by Odion.
It's illegal in nine countries.
Well, I played Brian Fantana in Anchorman.
He's the field reporter and
he has a Geraldo Rivera kinda look,
and a whole bunch of unearned confidence,
as do all of those guys in that newsroom.
Unearned confidence.
And they're all kind of dumb.
Where the hell's the suit store?
We've been walking for 45 minutes.
Rick, I thought you said this was a shortcut.
Fantastic.
Ryan Fantana's the guy is pretty impressed with himself,
or likes to present himself that way,
but is, you know, just staggeringly insecure,
and trying his hardest to look like
the smoothest dude out there.
It's rare to read a script that it's just so fun to read.
Just you, that you wanna re-read it for pleasure.
And certainly with comedies.
I did that with Wet Hot American Summer
and then I did that again with Anchorman.
I thought those were the two funniest scripts.
60% of the time, it works every time.
That doesn't make sense.
And they were funny for similar reasons,
and their absurdity and how meta certain things were,
and how it was so unlike everything else.
Probably why they both had trouble getting made,
and the reception was confusion for a lot of people.
But Anchorman was one that I just thought,
oh my God, this is the funniest,
craziest, most specific story.
Will Ferrell and Adam McKay when they write together,
it's just bliss.
News team assemble.
Hey, Ron. What's up?
It was a while before they, I was cast in it
I think I had a few months and I was just
on the phone every few days with my agents going
have you heard anything? Have you heard anything?
Which is not normally the way that I am,
but I was with that.
We met before we started filming to rehearse,
improvise some scenes or just kind of riff off of
what was in the script.
I had had experience with improvisation,
but never on a big studio movie.
I mean, I was pleasantly surprised when we started shooting,
and then Will might just go off in some direction
that I'm not prepared for,
or McKay would be behind the monitor yelling out lines.
You know, he and Will had worked together obviously on SNL,
and they had a way of doing things,
and Judd Apatow was a producer on it
and Judd had a way of kind of working in this style.
So we would always do what was in script,
but then we'd start kind of messing around.
It was a whole new way of working on a big budget movie,
and it was thrilling.
There are so many times in Anchorman and scenes
that I have such clear memories of laughing.
I didn't expect Will when he said,
I'm proud of you fellas.
You all kept your head on a swivel,
and that's what you gotta do
when you find yourself in a vicious co*ckfight.
That's not in the script or anything,
and I was like, took me by surprise.
You don't wanna laugh when you're in someone's take
because you don't wanna make something unusable.
And if it's really funny and then somebody laughs,
and you can't use it's really annoying,
and so there's always a pressure not to laugh.
That being said,
I think this scene that we laughed the hardest,
it was the first time I think even the crew
was getting a little annoyed
'cause we just couldn't get through it.
Which was the scene of all of us sitting around a table,
plotting how we were going to take down
Veronica Corningstone and Will is asking
Brick what he's eating and Brick says,
Oh, it's one of those delicious falafel hotdogs
with cinnamon and bacon on top.
What do you mean one of those?
Those don't exist.
That's a used coffee filter with cigarette butts on it.
And I remember looking at it and it was coffee grounds,
but it was like chocolate cake, but it looked like coffee,
a real coffee filter, like a cigarette butt,
a wrapper and then a dime.
And every time Carrell would take a bite of it,
it was so repulsive, we'd all start laughing,
we'd have to do it again
and then the buildup became funny
because Will would then say,
By the way Brick, what is that you're eating?
And as soon as you just go by the way Brick,
he didn't even get out, what are you eating?
[laughing]
It was the pause and then noticing,
and then we'd all just start laughing.
[upbeat music playing]
The 40 Year-Old Virgin.
You know, and like you grab a woman's breast,
and it's, and you feel it and it feels like
a bag of sand when you're touching it.
Bag of sand?
You know what I mean?
Why don't we just play?
Why don't you just deal the cards?
What are you talking about?
Steve had this sketch that he had done at Second City
that he'd written about a 40 Year-Old Virgin.
Actually the sketch was,
it was kind of recreated in that poker scene,
but it's a bunch of guys that are sitting around
kind of telling tales outta school about how, you know,
women, they've been with things they've done
and one guy who's like, oh yeah,
and it becomes clear that he's
never ever been with a woman.
You know, and that turned into the movie.
You're a virgin.
I am, shut up.
How does that happen?
Having now worked with Judd a few times,
we'd spent a lot of time before adding things to the script,
filming improvisations that would eventually
make their way into the script.
You know, by the time you start shooting
one of those movies,
you have a 200 and some odd page script.
When it came time to actually film,
sometimes we would take it upon ourselves
to start improvising.
Hey, did you ever see School of Rock?
[Andy] Yeah.
Well this is, it's called School of, you know.
Oh, that's nice.
Judd would say, all right, do more of that.
Keep, go back and say that.
He'll yell out lines and we'll be in the middle of the scene
and we just repeat what he says,
or maybe another writer will say something,
and they become these kind of collaborative
kind of jam sessions really.
And when something really cooks,
like when it's really, when it's working, you can tell,
and it's thrilling because nobody, including us,
like knows exactly what it is we're gonna say
or what's gonna happen or where it's gonna go.
To hopefully find a few moments here and there
because there's a lot of, you know,
most of it you'll never use and you wouldn't want to use it.
Cool, just the one right here, right?
Hi, how are you?
So this is your first time getting body wax?
When Steve was getting waxed in that scene, he really was.
[foreign language speaking]
[Andy screaming]
The girl who actually did it said that
her family owned a salon, she did this,
and I was like, I don't think that was true.
I don't think she'd ever done it.
Like one of those things where it's like an actor,
hire an actor, he's like, can you ride a horse?
I can ride a horse.
Can you wax it chest?
I can totally wax a chest.
That one hurt.
That one hurt just as much as the first one.
That's great man.
[Steve] Man!
You know, we were playing into it obviously.
I don't know if that's, if it's true that
Romany really did get queasy and wanted to leave,
but I mean it really was
like, you could tell it was painful.
We set up like five cameras
'cause once you know you did it,
you weren't gonna get to go back and do it again.
Yeah, Steve's hilarious.
And he knew how to scream and make it funny and
you're coming up with jokes on the fly too.
I mean, I think just a pattern in which he was waxed.
It's like he did look like a pumpkin.
So then it's like, you look like a man-o-lantern.
This is not a good look for me.
You look like a man-o-lantern.
Thank you very much, appreciate it.
There's always this kind of
somebody with a pen off to the side writing things
or sometimes you don't want it to say what you're gonna say
and you don't tell anybody.
If it works, it works, and if it doesn't, it doesn't.
[upbeat music playing]
I Love You Man.
I'm glad you called.
You get home safe, Pistol.
You got it, Jovin.
I'm sorry, what?
I first worked with Jason on Knocked Up,
and I knew Jason also because
he'd worked with Judd way before me,
and this way of working,
I think we found that we enjoyed
working with each other in that way.
John Hamburg had written the script,
and I remember thinking, this premise is brilliant.
I can't believe this hasn't been done.
It was just like a buddy film,
but it's really kind of in the structure of romantic comedy.
John met with both Jason and I at the same time.
Like, yeah, let's do this.
This is, this would be really, I think it would be a blast.
It was so much fun doing that movie,
and there was such a joyous feel on it.
I think because Jason and I like started,
we could complete each other's sentences
and as far as any kind of joke
or any kind of dumb little thing
that someone might think of,
the other guy wouldn't bat an eye
and take it and go with it in some other direction.
You're wearing a tuxedo, think James Bond, all right?
Gimme, gimme some James Bond.
No, it just looks like you're pointing at me.
I think we just really love
the characters we were playing.
I loved playing that character.
Awkward, insecure, just all of that stuff
is really fun to play.
Probably comes a little too easy to me
because I relate to it too much.
♪ Modern day warrior, mean mean stride ♪
♪ Today's Tom Sawyer, mean mean pride ♪
[guitar playing]
That's it.
How's that feel?
Rush was in the script and the reason was
because John Hamburg, when he was in high school,
had a band and Rush was his, that was the band.
You know, both Jason and I knew Rush and loved Rush
and this would be the perfect band
that these guys would share a love of this band.
And then it was just so fortuitous
because while we were shooting the movie,
Rush was on tour and they came to LA, and they had two shows
and there was a day in between each show, and they said,
all right, yeah, we can come by, we'll shoot a scene.
You know, I probably hear it a little less now
than I did at one point in my life,
but I think more than any other thing, yeah,
I, slap the bass is probably the line that
all of a sudden has just walked down the street,
and I'll hear somebody yell at from somewhere.
Slap a the bass, man.
There you go.
Slap a the bass, man.
There you go.
Slap at the bass, man.
I slap a the bass.
Please don't do that.
Or somebody'll you know, let me go slap the bass.
I know I've met a few few bass players in my life
who want to strangle me.
Like, dude, you ruin my life.
That f*cking joke.
Clueless.
Hey James Bond,
in America, we drive on the right side of the road.
I am. You tried driving in platforms.
Look, I gotta get back to school.
Wanna practice parking?
What's the point? Everywhere you go has valet.
When I first read this script for Clueless,
I thought, okay,
this is gonna be another movie about a bunch of kids.
And seemed pretty smart.
I was really kind of into it as I was reading it
and I thought all the characters were unique.
I'd been asked to read for Josh for that,
for the part that I played.
But I, when I went into the audition, I said, you know,
this part's really,
there's nothing really funny about this part that I,
I'd love to try for that one.
They said, sure, read for whatever, whatever you want.
But I said, well Murray's really funny.
And then they said,
well actually that's an African American part.
I said, okay, well then I won't read for that one, but uh...
Then they said, well would you, would you read for Josh?
The one that you,
the one you were supposed to read for at first place?
I said, well of course I would.
You just got here
and already you're playing couch commando.
Hey, in some parts of the universe,
maybe not in Contempo Casual,
but in some parts it's considered cool to know
what's going on in the world.
Preparation that I did for Josh,
I went to college and I think I just
lifted most of my own clothes for that movie.
Some of those clothes that I was wearing with causes on it,
that was my Amnesty International shirt
and it was my KU hat.
You could, have a bit of a, like a goatee kind of
growing it in and having it for a little bit.
Then that was gone.
Hey granola breath, you got something on your chin.
I'm growing a goatee.
Well that's good.
You don't wanna be the last one at the coffee house
without chin pubes.
Very true to I think my own college experience.
So I was certainly lucky enough to make it through
several rounds and get cast in that movie.
Can you imagine the nerve of that guy?
I mean making you worry like that.
He's the one that screwed up and then he goes and blames us.
I wanna say that scene on the top of the stairs,
we were kind of working on it
as we were filming it that day.
I was very self-conscious afterward.
Why are you saying you cared about me?
Josh.
As far as that kiss goes,
I think my manager at the time after
when that movie came out and said, oh that was not good.
He said, I did not do that very well.
So I'm like, hey, you weren't there.
How would you know?
It's a weird job when you're hired
and part of your job is to kiss somebody.
And I was very aware I was kissing the girl
from the Aerosmith videos
and that there was gonna be a lot of dudes
who were gonna be very jealous of me.
I was very aware of that.
Knocked up.
Hey, what's so great about bubbles?
They float. You can pop 'em.
I mean, I get it. I get it.
I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles.
That's sad.
When we were working on the script,
Judd and Leslie had been married
and together for a long time.
Has had my wife and I had been together for a long time
up until that point, you know,
and Judd wanted to hear things from my life and my marriage
and things that we, you know, we were dealing with
and being a young parent.
There were certain things like I never,
when my wife was pregnant, I didn't read the baby books.
And we got into an argument about it.
She took it as a hostile gesture,
which I totally understand in retrospect.
And I said, what did the cavemen do without
What to Expect When You're Expecting?
And I told Alyssa and Judd, you know, it was funny
and then it's in the movie now as Seth's character.
You know, you didn't even read the baby books.
I didn't read the baby book.
What's gonna happen?
How did anyone ever give birth without a baby book?
That's right.
The ancient Egyptians f*cking engraved
What to Expect When You're Expecting on the pyramid walls.
I forgot about that.
And when my wife and I saw the movie at she, she's like,
oh so, this is an interesting documentary
we're watching right now.
I literally am at a point
where I don't know what I can say.
So I'm the bad guy because I'm trying to protect our kids
from child molesters and mercury?
And you're cool 'cause you don't give a sh*t?
Yeah.
Yeah? Is that it?
Pretty much.
God, you're an asshole.
It was the first time that we had worked together,
Leslie and I, and I think the very first scene
that we filmed together was when we're in the bathroom.
So what do you think? Should we have sex tonight?
Ugh, sounds awful.
And then we did a, we got into a fight.
I'm just really constipated.
Do you really want to?
Well now.
And Leslie is such a good actress.
I went home that night, I was like, oh my God,
I think Leslie is really mad at me.
I think that she,
I think she maybe hates me
and really kind of rattled me a little bit.
Somehow it got back
and the next day Leslie came over to me and she goes,
I heard you think that I'm mad at you.
I said, I'm just, I'm, I didn't, I hope not.
'Cause I didn't try, I didn't want to upset you.
She goes, of course not.
I don't hate you. My God, I hate Judd.
And I thought oh, yeah, no, we're gonna have a blast.
We're gonna have so much fun.
There are five different types of chairs
in this hotel room.
Holy f*ck. What are they all doing in here?
These are five different types of chairs.
Get 'em outta here, man.
Set design had, there were, it was like a hotel room,
there were chairs that around I thought like
how do you act like you are peaking on mushrooms or like,
it isn't like drunk or high or something.
Like, I don't know, what do we think?
Shoot, let's, let's just put all the chairs together
and then like, all right, now go guys.
Oh man.
We knew we were gonna get to this idea that
can you believe like that somebody
would ever want to be with you, to marry you.
So we had an an end point,
thing we knew we were gonna kind of say, which was about,
but how we would get there, we didn't really know.
And those chairs were just happened to be props
in the set that they had built
and so we just pushed 'em all together
and we just kind of started rolling it.
You can't accept love?
You don't know what it is.
Love the most beautiful shining warmy thing in the world,
you can't accept it?
I have to go to this other chair.
Oh, this is a better energy.
[Paul] This is 40.
What is she doing?
Okay.
Oh my god. Oh my God.
Oh my gosh.
Don't do that.
What am I doing?
Don't fart in the bed.
You know, it's, I've known Judd and Leslie and the girls
for years and I knew them when they were babies, really.
And I went over to the house one night, I'm just like,
all right, I have dinner and see what their night is like.
You know how their evening kind of goes.
They're like, all right,
I'm gonna go put Maude to bed or Iris to bed
and read 'em the story or, I was just kind of an observer.
But I also knew them so it wasn't, you know,
we'd spent a lot of time together up until that point.
So it wasn't like I was some stranger kind of
taking notes at the end of their bed.
It all sounds so Daniel Day Lewis-y, doesn't it?
I'm gonna go put the kids to bed.
I did by the way.
I remember going to their room and they had a,
a machine that projected stars on their ceiling
and they're like, oh yeah, they don't sleep without this,
without this star machine on.
And then I went back
and I ordered two star machines off of Amazon.
And I still have 'em, they're great.
We used to build tree houses and play with sticks.
Nobody plays with sticks.
You and Charlotte can have a lemonade stand.
Play kick the can.
Look for dead bodies.
It's fun. That's fun to do.
Get a tire and then just take a stick
and run down a street with it.
Nobody does that crap. It's 2012.
You don't need technology.
No technology.
It was a weird feeling to do these scenes
where I'm acting opposite his wife
with his kid standing there and he's off, you know,
filming it all.
Was very aware of how strange, I mean,
and I kept trying to think
how are his children processing this?
Is this healthy?
Is what we're doing here right now safe and good?
With time and distance, I can say yes.
And it was a really fun experience.
I had a great time working on that movie.
I've had a great time working actually
on all movies with Judd.
I think they've been really, really fun
and they're, as far as creatively,
I think they're some of the most fulfilling
creative experiences
because of the collaboration and because of the freedom
that everybody feels I think.
And what they can do
and what they can maybe try and come up with.
Wet Hot American Summer.
[upbeat music]
Are you gonna clean that up?
Oh yeah, I will.
I just got, I don't have time right now.
Clean it up and come to my office for the meeting.
I gotta.
The making of Wet Hot American Summer was a blast.
It was the first thing that I think that a lot of the people
that we're working on it, it really spoke to our,
our kind of collective sensibility and senses of humor.
Hey. Whatcha writing on?
My gournal. Write my thoughts in it every day.
Oh, you mean a, a journal?
I think everyone kind of knew each other a little bit.
It was like all these kind of New York actors
and improv comedy and B alt comedy sea.
And we filmed it at a summer camp.
We had to leave in the middle of production
because the camp was closed for a week
because somebody hired it out to have a bar mitzvah.
You know, we all slept at the camp, it rained every day,
so whoever wasn't filming had to go into town,
which was about 30 minutes away and buy beer
so that when the days filming was done,
everyone, we all hung out.
We didn't have computers
like when no one had like cell phones, really.
It was just it, so we were, everyone was just there.
And also if you weren't working,
you went and watched other people filming their scenes.
So there was a real kind of camaraderie and a feeling
like a collective.
And it was like being at summer camp.
And so to do that and then work on material
that we all found funny
that we kind of couldn't believe was actually getting made
and we all kind of knew people are not going to get this,
but I think that people do get it or will find is funny
will find it really funny.
What is it?
You have barbecue sauce all over your face.
Obviously anything I work on, I don't know.
I don't know if something's good or bad.
I really don't.
I always go in with like the best intentions,
but I do know that like when Wet Hot American Summer
was done, I'm like, this movie's funny.
I know it's funny.
I'm and not, I'm laughing at the parts of just
like when they jump out of the truck
and they run over to the side of the building
and stand there.
Just stand there. And it makes the cut.
Hey you guys, wait up.
I was dying.
I think that's like the funniest thing.
And so then when, you know, yeah,
when it came out people like,
well this is just seems like a bunch of hit and miss jokes
and it doesn't really add up.
And that was the first time where I'm like, no, I actually,
I, I don't agree with that opinion.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Are you, are you Chuck?
Oh man, you know, they won't change that flyer.
That's my main land name. My Hawaiian name is Kunu.
Oh cool. Sorry. Yeah.
Nah, it's all good.
Does Kunu have some like cool Hawaiian meaning?
Means Chuck.
I'd worked with Jason Siegel a couple of times.
I love Jason.
Stoler, again, all the people I've worked with in the past
and there really wasn't much in that script, necessarily,
about that character.
And Jason said come down and play a surf instructor.
You know, if you ever go to these resorts in Hawaii,
there's always somebody that is working there
and they're super cool and they're gonna take you out
and teach you how to surf or teach you how to scuba dive
or whatever it is.
And you spend half a day with them and it's like,
this person has really got everything kind of figured out.
What a great life, what a cool thing.
And then you spend a little longer
and you learn a little bit more about their lives
and there's the running from something
and broken in some way and this guy has a, a daughter.
He's like, yeah, you know, I,
I haven't seen her in a while but that's, that's cool.
She's on her own journey.
Just these, these kinds of sad statements.
I think I was in my thirties,
I was playing someone who was 44.
I remember thinking like that's super funny.
Really old. 44.
I mean if you had to put a number on it,
I guess I'd be 44.
f*ck!
And so a lot of those scenes, I mean all of 'em really,
I dunno what I was gonna say,
what it's gonna do and then we're all,
we all figuring out like we're all there on the beach.
You're like, what if we just keep, get up.
That's too much now down.
Like there's no rhyme or reason to anything
the guy is saying.
Yeah. We were winging 'em.
Ant-Man.
[upbeat music]
Would you like some sugar?
Yeah, thanks.
You know what I'm okay.
My friend Edgar Wright, he'd written a script
with Joe Cornish,
he asked if I would be interested in playing this part.
I thought it'd be fun to try and play a role that was
so different than anything that I'd really played.
I mean the idea of a superhero
was really intriguing and great.
I mean these things are seen all over the world
and by all ages, you know?
This, that's a somewhat new experience for me.
Hey, you're cute.
[screaming]
That was a lot scarier a second ago.
The first two were more standalone,
smaller, kind of separate from,
from everything else that didn't really have the
huge spectacle maybe of some of the other big Marvel movies
and this one kind of does.
In this new version in Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania,
it is such a huge film.
I mean just the scope of it.
The scale of it and how it's kind of kicking off
this new phase with the introduction of Kang.
What's it gonna be, Ant-Man?
You know, one of the most incredible experiences
I've had working on the Marvel films
is getting to meet Stan Lee.
And one of the things that he told me was
how happy he was that they were making Ant-Man as a film.
He felt in the comics,
it was very tough to really gauge the scale.
If you're drawing Ant-Man,
you can't really draw other things at the proper scale.
So audiences were going to finally see Ant-Man
in the way that he always envisioned Ant-Man.
To work in within the MCU and and these films,
you do feel a part of a collective in a way.
There's something pretty great about that.
You know, when you're an actor it can be
kind of a solitary existence
and when you feel like you're kind of going through it
with a group of people, it makes it fun.
I feel like real solid friendships form.
I kind of can't believe that it's been
now almost nine years.
Is that right?
Something like that? Yeah.
