[IMG:L]It’s usually bad news when the original stars decline to return for a sequel. Sure, James Bond and Batman are iconic enough that they transcend rotating actors, but Speed 2 without Keanu Reeves was a bus-sized bomb, not a blockbuster. Even Weekend at Bernie’s II got the dead guy to reprise his role, so when Jim Carrey backed out of Bruce Almighty II, proceeding ahead was a tricky road.
Luckily for the filmmakers, one of their supporting players in Bruce became a mega-movie star. Steve Carell had one scene-stealing sequence when Carrey’s Bruce used his divine powers to make Carell’s adversarial anchorman babble incoherently at the news desk. Four years later, after the phenomenal successes of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Little Miss Sunshine, a Steve Carell vehicle now sounds like a great idea.
“The first movie I ever did was Bruce Almighty,” recalled Carell. “[Director] Tom [Shadyac] took very good care of me. The chance to work with Tom again, sort of on a one on one basis, was like a dream come true.”
A minor celebrity from his correspondent gig on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Carell was a gimmicky cameo in Bruce. Despite his subsequent achievements, even Carell could not believe he was being handed a franchise sequel.
“How the last few years came about was very surreal for me. [Shadyac] actually came and pitched it to me and I thought that he was going to pitch the idea of a sequel, starring Jim, and then maybe featuring me as another thorn in his side. But then when he said, ‘We’d like you to play the title role,’ I was like, ‘You had me at hello.’’ I was totally there.”
After teaching Bruce to appreciate his own blessings, God (Morgan Freeman) tasks Evan Baxter (Carell), now a congressman, to build an ark for an oncoming flood. To motivate him, God has pairs of animals follow Evan around, and gives him a biblical beard that grows back no matter how much he shaves. It is a different brand of humor than Carrey‘s slapstick, mugging antics, yet Carell may still face comparisons just because Evan is a sequel.
“To even be mentioned in the same sentence with him is a huge complement to me. Even if I am unfavorably compared to Jim Carrey I take that as a compliment. Thanks.”
[IMG:R]God does not just unleash a flood to give Evan something to do. He is also trying to teach his disciple a lesson about life. Evan has become so focused on his political career that he neglects his wife and three sons. The construction project forces Evan to spend more time at home. An acting career can be similarly monumental, so Carell is careful not to incur God (or his wife’s!) wrath. Somehow he has energy for everything.
“I use sports energy drinks,” he joked. “Highly caffeinated sports energy drinks are the answer.” But seriously, “I am the type of person who is always waiting for the other shoe to drop. So I’m not taking any of what is happening now for granted. Essentially I know there is a window of time when I’ll be able to do these things and I’m just trying to take advantage of that now. While at the same time, [I am] being very cautious to not let it interfere with my family life. That, to me, is the line. If it starts to bleed over to time away from my family, then it’s not going to happen, but so far I’ve been able to balance those things.”
Not that the Baxter kids are angels. Sometimes they need a time out, as do the Carell tykes. “My kids are angels and never do anything wrong and are never aggravating and are perfect in every way,” Carell deadpanned. “I have a 3 and a 6-year-old, so I think everybody goes through that. The kids in the movie are bit older than mine, but everybody goes through problems and difficulties and brattiness and where to draw the line.”
Even working with child actors can call upon parenting skills that are not necessarily part of an actor’s job description. Scenes confined to an automobile became tense. “We spent a lot of time driving around in that Hummer. They were just in the back seat and there were times when they would not stop. They were getting dirty and they were telling dirty jokes to each other and they were laughing and we were trying to do a take and they’d be all over the place.”
Costar Lauren Graham, who plays Evan’s wife in the film, tried to help, but Carell had to lay down the law. “Lauren and I sort of became the parental figures. It was like, ‘Okay guys!’ It was like good cop/bad cop and I was generally bad cop with the kids. We got along really well with them.”
Misbehaving children were nothing compared to even the best trained animal performers. The critters may have followed their trainers commands, but that did not make things any more comfortable for Carell.
[IMG:L]”Those birds were on me for a few days straight and they were real. That wasn’t a computer-generated flock of birds on me. They would literally not get off me and I could walk around. I don’t know how they trained them to do it, but they would go nowhere. And frankly, to be blunt, they were well fed before shooting began. So that posed its own set of difficulties as well.”
Sometimes all of Carell‘s patience was for naught. A scene with a snake slithering across his shoulders ended up being created in post-production, though he still had to endure a real snake on the set.
“The snakes that they used, they couldn’t [show in the film] because they kept crawling down the back of my jacket. These were like pythons. These were serious, big, nasty snakes. But you couldn’t see them. They were there, but they were just, like, in my clothes. So I had to suffer through that and they generate a snake over me.”
Carell may complain about animal antics or the hassle of prosthetic beards, but it is only for the sake of promoting the movie. In real life, he keeps the slight pains of his craft in perspective.
“I never want to hear myself complaining about it. You hear actors complaining about prosthetic makeup and it’s not fun, but let’s face it. I’m not on a roof in 100-degree weather putting tar down. I’m getting a beard stuck on my face. It’s really not that bad.”
