| By Fred Topel
In Theaters August 19
|
When you see the poster of Steve Carell’s awkward smile, you believe the title The 40-Year-Old Virgin. When you see the movie, you’ll find that Carell’s character, is a normal guy, perhaps a little too obsessed with comic book collectibles, but not repulsive to women.
“I identify with him in the sense that he is trying,” Carell said. “He's doing his best to get through life and keep a good aspect and disposition going. Keep his hopes up, but I think there is an underlying sadness to the character, which in fact there is to me. I think there's the parallel. I don't know. I think there are elements of who I am in who this guy.”
To get into the mindset of a 40-year-old virgin, Universal Pictures actually provided Carell with case studies of middle aged virginity. “What we found to be the case more often than not is that they are just normal people who for one reason or another just never did it. Very similar to the character, at some point they just kind of gave up on the whole notion because it was more difficult to keep attempting than to just give up. That's kind of the research that we did based on the character.”
A veteran fake news correspondent of The Daily Show and Anchorman, Carell makes his leading man debut in Virgin, yet he feels no pressure. “All the way through shooting it I just kept thinking if this is the last movie I ever do this has been great. This has been just fun. So I try not to get ahead of myself at all in terms of what the next thing is. I hope I keep working and I’ve been really lucky just to support myself acting and being able to help create and be the lead in a movie is way beyond any expectation I ever had. So, I’m pretty happy with what has happened so far, and honestly, if this it, if it all comes crashing down tomorrow, I’m still pretty happy.”
Carell sacrificed for his art in Virign, including a one-take scene where he got his chest waxed for real. “We set up five cameras because we knew there would be one take. There was no way of going back and trying to get it again. So we set up a camera up on the guys, one over me, one specifically on my chest, one on the waxer. It was not scripted. We just had an idea for where it would go. We hired a woman who was an actress slash waxer, which in itself was a little daunting because she wasn't a professional waxer. That was all real. If you watch closely there's one close up where you can see blood actually beading to the surface so that was not CGI'd.”
Don’t feel too bad though. It was all his idea. “When I pitched it to [director] Judd [Apatow], I said it really should be for real. It really should be legitimate waxing because I thought to see them laughing at me in pain would be probably the funniest part of the scene. There's this guy thing where it's this sadistic nature that men have to see other men in non-life threatening pain and especially self-inflicted. Like the whole ball to the nuts, a kick in the nuts. It's just funny. You can't help but laugh at it if you're a guy because you know you're not going to die. To kind of capture that on camera I thought would be really amusing.”
Ever the modest fellow, Carell finally admitted that it did hurt like hell. “It hurt so much. It really did hurt. A lot of the women in the crew, they were aware of what was going to happen and I wasn't. And they saying, ‘Are you sure you don't want to trim your hair down a little bit? It will hurt less. Can I give you some Advil?’ I kept saying, ‘No, No, I'm fine. I'm fine’ and then halfway through I was just sweating and thought this was a bad idea.”
Carell spent seven weeks with patches of skin on his chest before the hair grew back. “My wife was very happy when it eventually did because I looked like a freak for a long time.”
40-Year-Old Virgin joins Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo and Wedding Crashers in this summer’s onslaught of R rated comedies. As co-writer of Virgin, Carell did not set out to break taboos, but knew he had to go for it a little.
“Just based on the subject matter we felt that it was an R-rated movie. And Universal never blinked at that, and in fact asked us to go to earn it, to actually be a hard R, to not pull any punches and to make an R-rated movie and not try to soften it. Just make the movie we want to make. But the objective wasn’t oh, let’s try to make this more of an R. We just wrote what we thought was the funniest, we wrote for the characters and we wrote for the situations and we didn’t really think about, well, we have to make this dirtier or less dirty. We just wrote it the way we saw it.”
The 40-Year-Old Virgin opens August 19. |
