Double trouble
ru meets Dru in “Despicable Me 3,” the second sequel in the outrageously popular animated movie series.
And for voice actor Steve Carell, it was double the fun to play both the warmhearted master villain of the last two films and now the long-lost twin brother he never knew he had. Carell keeps emphasizing how fun it was, in fact, to bring vocal life to two super silly characters. While we’re sure that’s true, that might also be because he’s kind of embarrassed to fall back on any actorly rhetoric about how challenging the job was.
“It’s so funny to talk about ‘the approach’ to an animated character,” Carell, looking his casual, classy best in a light gray suit and blue polo shirt, acknowledges. “The acting process that goes into something like this is basically making silly voices. I get it — what else are you going to ask about it? — but it was fun.
“I wanted to have the brother just come from a different place emotionally. ... Boy, is that going to sound terrible in print,” Carell continues with a few chuckles. “It’s pretentious, it’s crazy. But Gru is a grump, and his brother Dru is very lighthearted and frivolous. I wanted to express that in their contrasting voices.”
Dru speaks with the same quizzical, Middle European accent as Gru in a higher register, with more joy and enthusiasm behind it. But don’t be lulled by his outgoing personality. Dru may seem like the happiest — not to mention richest — guy in the pigs-and-cheese obsessed island nation of Freedonia, but he has one very dark issue.
You see, when their parents broke up shortly following their birth, Mom kept Gru and supervillain Dad took Dru back home with him. The handsome, likable, blond-haired twin never quite had the nasty goods to go into the family business and feels like he was a disappointment to his father due to that. When Gru brings his family — adorable adopted daughters Margo, Edith and Agnes and new wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) — to visit the sibling, he’s not only shocked to find such a better looking version of himself; Dru wants his brother to show him how to be villainous in the worst way.
Gru arrives in Freedonia with his own baggage. After having turned hero in the second movie, he abruptly loses his job at the Anti-Villain League due to his failure to capture the wicked Balthazar Bratt (“South Park’s” Trey Parker), a 1980s TV child star gone very, very bad. Worse, most of his Minions have left him — they miss the cool old criminal days, too — and when Dru suggests a return to lawlessness, Gru gets the cartoon version of an existential crisis churning inside of his bald scalp.
“A lot of what Gru is navigating in this third movie has to do with sibling rivalry and, also, the expectations you have of relationships in general,” Carell reckons. “He has grand expectations of what his brother is going to be like and what they’re going to do together, and how his life is going to be charmed by this. It doesn’t turn out to be that way, and that’s sort of the theme of this movie, too. Things don’t always turn out the way you want them to, but that’s OK because going down a different path isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
Nor is being good, even when going the other way is starting to look good again.
“He’s definitely being tempted by his brother, who is a wannabe villain and tries to enlist Gru back into the ranks,” the actor notes. “Gru is going through a crisis of conscience because now he is a father and a husband and he has responsibilities. I think that’s something that’s very relatable, that once your life changes and you mature into a different person, there are certain parts of your past that you have to let go. That’s not always easy to do, but you have to make your choices.”
Whoa, heavy. I thought we were having fun here? Well, Carell made it easy on himself by recording Gru’s and Dru’s lines separately, as one would with other actors for animation. He’s a little apologetic about that, too.
“I think if I was better at it, I could go back and forth,” he says of taping the brothers’ dialogues, “but I took the coward’s way out and just did one and then the other. I’ve seen voice actors do five characters talking to each other, but it wasn’t necessary for this. I’m sure that’s how Mel Blanc [the voice of just about every character in Warner Bros.’ classic Looney Tunes shorts] did it.”
Modesty aside, Carell actually did work very carefully on creating Dru’s voice.
“We played for a few sessions to just get it,” he explains. “It takes a while to nudge it into place and find a voice that’s fun to listen to and that’s not just grating. You know, you can do a character voice that’s distinct but it’ll annoy the heck out of you if you hear it too long, so part of the trick is to do something that could potentially be funny and have some different levels to it but is not going to drive you crazy if you’re parents and your kids are watching ‘Despicable Me 3’ in the back of the minivan.”
Which would be just about every parent who can afford a minivan (the rest would be driven crazy by the children watching “Despicables” on loop at home). Carell is as amazed as anyone about the franchise’s success, which has already spun off a Minions series of their own.
“I don’t know, exactly,” he admits of why the movies have struck such a golden nerve. “I thought the first movie was funny and charming and really had a warmth to it. It had a heart, but without being overly sentimental. It was also a little bit dangerous for a kids movie; there’s a scene where an iron maiden device closes on a little girl, then you see red fluid coming out the bottom, and it turns out her juice box had been skewered.
“I mean, that’s a pretty intense moment for a kids movie, but the kids really liked it. I think kids and adults can identify with these movies because they’re cute but also have gritty sides to them. They also depict some very real, human emotions, ironically, which are hard enough to depict in a nonanimated movie.”
Carell has been doing a bang-up job of the latter in recent years. Though the actor trained at Second City and made his first big splashes in cable (“The Daily Show”), broadcast (“The Office”) and movie comedies (“The 40-Year-Old Virgin”), he’s been going to impressive dramatic extremes in films such as “Foxcatcher,” “The Big Short” and “Cafe Society.” Coming up is the highly anticipated “Battle of the Sexes,” in which he plays tennis hustler supreme Bobby Riggs to Emma Stone’s Billie Jean King; a turn as a troubled military father in Richard Linklater’s “Last Flag Flying,” an adaptation of a novel by Darryl Ponicsan, who also wrote the book the Jack Nicholson classic “The Last Detail” is based on; and “Beautiful Boy” as another stressed parent, this time of a meth addict.
“There’s not a master plan,” Carell explains in his usual, self-effacing way. “It’s not as if I’m consciously transitioning from comedy to drama. It’s just based on the kinds of things I’ve been offered recently. Those have been dramas.”
Certainly nothing to apologize for. As long as you’re having fun.