Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures - Steve Carell as Cal in "Crazy, Stupid, Love."
Steve Carell doesn’t have a plan.
The actor’s recent departure from “The Office” could be interpreted as a strategy to establish a long-term career in films before wearing out his welcome on TV. But in discussing his new relationship comedy “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” which opened Friday, Carell claims to have no such road map.
Speaking on the phone from his home in Marshfield Hills, Mass., the 48-year-old actor insists that “the decision really had more to do with my family than anything else. I have two little kids, and I just wanted to spend more time with them. I’d never been able to do anything with my kids during their spring breaks; I’ve always been working, as long as they’ve been in school.” So the first chance he got, this April, he flew the clan to Disney World.
Tight work scheduling isn’t the only thing keeping movie stars from taking their kids to theme parks, of course. Wasn’t the actor mobbed by fans? “I don’t think I cause much of a stir, wherever I go,” he reports, though he admits “the park did give me a guide. You feel guilty about having someone to help you navigate the place, but they said it really has nothing to do with my convenience, that it’s really for the park’s convenience, keeping the flow moving.”
He laughs self-consciously after hearing himself call the Disney trip “magical,” then stands his ground: “It really was! It was a great, great week.”
That kind of exuberance wouldn’t have made it into “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” a broken-marriage tale in which Carell, cuckolded after 25 years, decides to become a cynical womanizer. Though the film is ultimately more romantically idealistic than one expects from Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, directors of the enthusiastically sordid “Bad Santa,” cast and crew were intent on not making a sappy romance.
“We all agreed that we had to keep it away from being overly sentimental,” Carell says. “We employed what we called ‘treacle cutters’ throughout the movie, in moments on the borderline of being overly precious. Whenever we sensed it might be going a bit too far in that direction, we would try to undercut it somehow.”
As an example, he offers an ad-libbed wisecrack that follows a fight between Carell’s character and his estranged wife. “I’m left alone in a parking lot, leaning against a car, and it begins to rain. I looked up, and I improvised the line ‘What a cliche.’ Because it could have so easily been a cliche moment — the rain falling on the sad-sack. That was a way to let the air out of it a little.”
Some of the film’s most memorable jokes were improvised, it seems. Like the very funny one involving a Velcro wallet: “We were rehearsing the scene, and they were getting the lights all set up, and I asked one of the prop heads, ‘Do you by any chance have a Velcro wallet in your prop truck?’ He went and rummaged around and he found one. That became a nice little running gag for us.”
The wallet emerges while a pickup artist (Ryan Gosling) is coaching Carell on style; soon enough, the schlub becomes a hustler. Carell remembers shooting a lady-killer montage and thinking: “I can’t believe all of these extras have to look at me as if I’m very handsome and alluring. That is such a rotten job for them right now.”
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