While The Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart has made a running joke of his flailing acting career, his erstwhile comic foil/ace correspondent Steve Carell has quietly built an impressive résumé in television and film. Along with Stephen Colbert, Carell graduated from Chicago's Second City troupe, then became a cast member and writer on the short-lived sketch-comedy series The Dana Carvey Show. After it was cancelled, Carell joined Colbert on The Daily Show, becoming a standout among the show's faux-newsmen.
As The Daily Show was becoming a revered comic institution, Carell was moonlighting in commercials, other TV shows, and movies, such as the mega-blockbuster Bruce Almighty, which gave him a tiny but attention-grabbing role. He followed it with an even more memorable turn as a mildly retarded newsman in Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, and with the lead role in the American adaptation of the revered British sitcom The Office. Most recently, Carell co-wrote and stars in the new film The 40-Year-Old Virgin, a surprisingly sensitive comedy about a middle-aged misfit stumbling toward maturity. The A.V. Club recently spoke with Carell about The Daily Show, making more movies than he has time to see, and channeling Paul Lynde.
The A.V. Club: So, you're a big movie star now.
Steve Carell: Oh, yeah, right. I don't know about that, but man, this is all very surreal. Seriously, it's all very strange and surreal.
AVC: A good place to start would be at the beginning: Were you a funny guy growing up?
SC: No. Not at all. I tend not to be someone who's on all the time, or is always trying to make other people laugh. Because my wife [Nancy Walls] was on Saturday Night Live, and she's very smart and funny, people sometimes ask whether our home life is a continuous laugh riot, and it couldn't be further from that. We enjoy each other, we make each other laugh, but it's not George Burns and Gracie Allen banter constantly. It's changing diapers and chasing kids and... you know. We're very normal.
AVC: You're just an average everyday Joe?
SC: Just an average, everyday person with servants.
AVC: They take care of your children so you can feel free to—
SC: I have all the photo ops with my children so people perceive us to be very hands-on. You have to pick your moments.
AVC: A lot of comedians have a compulsive need to be funny. It's almost like a form of mental illness.
SC: I suppose. I think the other side of that is that some people just derive great joy from making other people laugh. And I do, but I don't feel like I need to do it 24 hours a day. And I just don't think I'm that funny a person to talk to. And as you can well tell with this interview, I'm just not. I don't think I'm necessarily that glib or hysterical in person.
AVC: And yet you've managed to have this successful career in comedy.
SC: It's all a clever ruse.
AVC: What's it like doing a field piece for The Daily Show?
SC: [In the beginning,] the producer just called me and said, "Stephen Colbert highly recommends you, would you be interested in doing a field piece sometime?" So I went out and I did a piece about an Elvis impersonator who also ran a venom research facility. In other words, it was a guy who dressed up like Elvis and had snakes in his trailer, and that was the story. In the middle of Nebraska. So that was kind of my introduction to the world of The Daily Show.
AVC: Sounds like a pretty surreal way to make a living.
SC: It is. There's very little you could do to prepare to be a correspondent on The Daily Show, because it's not being a journalist, it's not being an actor. It involves elements of both of those things, but they're not required necessarily as job experience. It's helpful if you know how to improvise, but again, not a requirement. So there are all these different facets of the job that you can't... There is no basis for having experience to be a mock news correspondent. I guess what they were looking for is people who understood the tone of the show and who could sort of stay in character and look the part.
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