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Will Ferrell: The low-key star

MIAMI — Will Ferrell recalls the first time he realized his destiny in life.

"I remember in elementary school when I first learned to run into a door, kick up at the bottom and snap my head back," he says. "I don't know where I learned it, but I would get huge laughs from the other kids."

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Eventually, those kids gave way to the broadcast audience of Saturday Night Live, on which Ferrell was a cast member from 1995 to 2002. Unlike many of his television colleagues, however, Ferrell then found a way of trading in that success for movie stardom. He has been able to create a gallery of unforgettable, often naive comic characters in recent years, from a full-grown elf to a clueless TV anchor. His latest, a NASCAR driver, comes to screens Friday in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Few bankable stars are as soft-spoken and low-key off-camera as Will Ferrell. He sits unassumingly on a hotel suite couch in a button-down shirt with rolled up sleeves, and could easily be mistaken for an accountant. He knows how he comes across and that he usually disappoints his fans, who expect him to be more manic.

"Yes, I'm continually letting people down, right and left," he says drily. "I just have a rule with myself that if the moment strikes me and I feel like goofing around, I will. And if not, well, I'm always polite and thankful when people come up to me and say 'hello.' "

He would like to cooperate and explain how he managed to go from SNL to movie stardom, but the subject just stumps him.

"It's not like I had this whole list of things lined up for me to do. Old School (the 2003 aging frat boys comedy) was in the can, so I just kind of took a leap of faith," he says with a shrug. "Maybe it helps that I'm comfortable writing for myself, that always give you a little bit of an advantage. But I guess I just picked right and had some luck. It's all an educated guess, this whole thing, anyway."

In most of his comedy hits, Ferrell has not strayed far from variations on the same character. There's rowdy frat brother Frank the Tank in Old School; the stuffed-shirt, swelled-headed newscaster in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy; and now obtuse pro NASCAR daredevil Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights.

Asked what they all have in common, Ferrell pauses and actually thinks, rather than tossing out a flip answer. Eventually he says, "I think at their base there's still somewhat of an innocence. Somewhat of a vulnerable place that they reveal and that's always fun to juxtapose. For instance, Ricky Bobby is someone who's so brash and cocky, but at the same time he's still looking around the room like, 'I'm right, right?' He needs yes men."

When it is suggested to him that they are all likable doofuses, Ferrell is too polite to disagree. "Yeah, I guess that's good," he concedes. "I like to describe a lot of these guys as people with unearned confidence."

He gravitates to these characters because they have so little in common with himself. "I don't usually feel a need to be a brash person," Ferrell says. "I'm pretty easygoing for the most part. So, yeah, I'm pretty opposite of these guys, but that's why I love playing them."

Not that he feels he repeats himself, movie to movie, Ferrell insists. "There's not a conscious effort on my behalf to go, 'I did that in the last movie, I should do that again because that's what they're expecting.' I'm sure naturally you just have those tendencies, so it probably happens on some level, that certain jokes, certain themes are kind of reminiscent slightly. But, you know, I'm just kind of clipping along, just doing what I think is funny, from a project-to-project basis."

Ferrell is no deep thinker when it comes to his philosophy of comedy. "I think comedy comes out of absurd situations and the character not knowing that it's absurd. That's the funniest type of thing," he offers. "You have to be totally committed to what is happening. And when stakes are high in mundane or ridiculous settings, it usually comes out pretty funny."

Although Ferrell has worked with some interesting filmmakers, from Woody Allen (Melinda and Melinda) to Nora Ephron (Bewitched) to Ben Stiller (Zoolander), he balks at the suggestion that he is planning to get into the director's chair himself one day. "Uh, no, not that I know of," he says. "I don't know, it's a lot to keep track of. I'm not really ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), but I'm only one thing at a time. I think my head would explode."

When he does stretch himself, it is to test his abilities in drama, as he did in Adam Rapp's minimally distributed Winter Passing, released earlier this year, in which Ferrell played a live-in handyman and gatekeeper to a reclusive, alcoholic novelist.

Although few saw it ("That played in only about 10 theaters," says Ferrell), he is pleased that he took the risk of working outside of his comic comfort zone. "Well, that one actually served its purpose beautifully. Just for myself, getting to do a different kind of performance. It was nice to be on the red carpet of the Oscars and have (Chicago Sun-Times movie reviewer) Roger Ebert say, 'Nice work. That's going to serve you well.' And I went 'Wow, it's worth it right there.' "

When writer-director Rapp offered him the role, Ferrell says he told him, " 'I can't guarantee you whether I'll be good or not,' but he had faith in me and we gave it a shot."

The same goes when Allen asked him to play the comic romantic lead in Melinda and Melinda, a part that years earlier Allen probably would have played himself. "I was not going to say 'no' to Woody Allen," Ferrell explains, but he feels he never really got to know the comedian-turned-filmmaker. "He just really keeps to himself. At the end of the movie, it was, 'I hope you had a good time. I did. I thought you were very good and I hope when you see it, you like what you did.' That was it."

Of all the directors he has worked with, Ferrell is most at ease with his director and co-writer on Anchorman and Talladega Nights, Adam McKay.

"He might be arguably the funniest person I know, performer or otherwise. He can make me laugh like no one else," says Ferrell. "When I'm working with Adam, we just have a real good give-and-take, where he goes, 'If you see anything, speak up.' So I feel free to go, 'Shouldn't we say this part differently?' We always collaborate, even to the point where he encourages me to come in on the days I wasn't working just to take a look."

Due out in November for Ferrell is Stranger Than Fiction, in which he plays an IRS auditor who finds himself the subject of narration that only he can hear. Appearing with him is an A-list cast including Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Queen Latifah. Ferrell is currently in the middle of filming Blades of Glory, an ice skating comedy that he stars in with Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder.

And apparently on permanent hold is a movie that could gain him serious respect as an actor, a long-gestating adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces, in which Ferrell would play Ignatius J. Reilly, an intelligent slob who lives with his mother in New Orleans. Although he is gaining muscle in the studio hierarchy, Ferrell is not sure how to get this project unstuck. "I was doing the Curious George press junket with Drew Barrymore and she's attached to the (Dunces) project too," he says. "She was like, 'We're gonna try and get this thing going,' and I'm like, 'OK, just let me know.' "

For the moment, though, he is content to publicize Talladega Nights, about which he beams with pride. "I'm so excited that the racing looks as good as it does," Ferrell says. "Because that was a real goal of ours, to make sure that looked authentic. In fact, when we looked at some of the first dailies, we started laughing out loud, because it looked so good it seemed ridiculous.

"And also too if you write something from scratch and it strikes a chord with people, that's when you're really proud of the work."

A hap_erstein@pbpost.com