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Nov 12,2006 - Nov 19,2006 |
Will Ferrell loves being told what to do
Comedian stars in Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction
By Angela Baldassarre
Comedian Will Ferrell has been listening to someone who's constantly telling him what to do for years. Now, ironically, he's in a movie "about" someone who's telling him what to do, and he's more his own man than ever before.
Dressed like he's just been out jogging, he joins co-star Dustin Hoffman, in a nicely pressed gray suit, and Emma Thompson, in a designer gown, at a recent interview.
"Gosh, no one told me I had to dress up for these things," he quips, looking at his two co-stars who each have two Oscars to their credits. He, on the other hand, won a Razzie along with Nicole Kidman for Worst Screen Couple in Bewitched last year.
Ferrell is new to superstar fame. He's new at commanding a $20 million salary, and some of his recent movies, like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Old School and Elf have been $100-million-plus runaway surprise hits. He's one of a handful of success stories of the people from Saturday Night Live to break out into a film career and actually make it. And, interestingly enough, in his latest movie, Stranger Than Fiction, he plays the straight guy.
"That was one of the things that appealed to me," Ferrell explains in his characteristic deadpan. "It's so funny and different and touching and all these elements, [it's] a completely different type of film, not only as an acting exercise for me, but also just thematically, of anything that I've gotten to do. And it's a wonderful story."
The story follows a dull, non-descript tax investigator named Harold Crick played by Ferrell, who's rather meticulously methodical. He is in complete control of his life until he starts hearing a voice in his head - a very specific voice of a woman with a British accent. No one else can hear the voice, but it's constantly telling him what to do and think. It's as if the voice is narrating his life.
Crick goes to seek professional help and finds a literary theorist, Dr. Jules Hilbert, played by Hoffman. Dr. Hilbert advises him to take control of his life, and that ends up changing Crick's relationship with a free-spirited baker named Ana, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. He ends up trying to find the novelist, Kay Eiffel, portrayed by Thompson, because she is ready to kill off her character, Harold Crick in her book. But, first he must go through her bull-doggish assistant, Penny, played by Queen Latifah.
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