THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN
Fifteen years ago, Judd Apatow directed his first feature, leaping from a career in standup and TV to become the cinematic king of comedy. Total Film gets together with the writer/ director to reflect upon his cherry-popping moment…
When we started testing the movie it got gigantic laughs – I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten more laughs than those first test screenings for The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” admits director Judd Apatow, recalling the 2005 release of his game-changing feature debut. “It really was an opportunity to showcase all these people we thought deserved big comedy careers.”
You don’t need us to tell you just how on-point Apatow’s radar is for finding funny people. After cutting his teeth on cult series Freaks And Geeks in 1999 – a project that introduced him to future collaborators Seth Rogen, James Franco and Jason Segel – he quickly set his sights on the big screen. All he needed was an idea and a comedian exciting enough to help him make the jump.
“I’d been trying to get several different movies greenlit in the years prior to The 40-Year-Old Virgin without success,” Apatow tells us between editing stints on his Pete Davidsonfronted next film, The King Of Staten Island. “I met Steve Carell when I produced Anchorman and he was just as funny as a human being could be. I asked him if he had any ideas where he would be the lead and I don’t think he had thought about that at all. I don’t believe he thought that was on the cards for him.”
Apatow’s star-making eye for comedy talent drew him towards Carell, then a relatively unknown funnyman who had stolen shows at Chicago’s Second City Theatre – a breeding ground for future comedy giants – and delivered memorable turns in a handful of cult films. “I thought, ‘I would love to see any movie starring this man.’ A few days later he told me about a couple of characters and one was the 40-year-old virgin.”
Based on a sketch workshopped during his Second City years, Carell’s irresistible creation quickly struck a chord. “I related to it – too much,” laughs the director. “We both realised the best version would be a very credible character; we wanted people to believe he existed.” As their does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title indicates, Apatow and Carell’s story followed Andy, a strait-laced singleton stuck in a state of arrested development
thanks to a rather extended dry patch. When his secret is outed, Andy’s co-workers make it their mission to push their pal out of his comfort zone and scratch this long-overdue itch. “It came together very easily and we enjoyed every second of it,” remembers Apatow. “It was the least painful birthing process of any script I’ve worked on.”
When it came to fleshing out electronics-store worker Andy’s world, Apatow kept things grounded. “A lot of it was based on somebody who was stunted,” he says. “There was a nerdy teenager aspect to a lot of his life. He wore khaki pants and a boring shirt and rode a bicycle to work. His house is filled with toys he’s collected.
“We thought it was funny that he worked out a lot because clearly he had a lot of energy that he needed to expend,” he chuckles. “He ate breakfast alone but when you see his plate, it’s all perfectly presented like the finest restaurant. Everything was basically him having too much time on his hands. We wanted his reality to be that he wasn’t progressing.”
Unlike his scene-stealing turns in Bruce Almighty and Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy, Carell opted for a more subdued performance for his leading-man debut. “We thought you would expect him to be big and broad and that the character might be obnoxious,” says Apatow, explaining how they found Andy’s tone. “There was a guy who I’d see at the Improv in LA and one day I was watching TV and he was on this daytime talk show. I wondered what he was on for and then it came up that he was a 40- or 45-year-old virgin. I remember his personality because he was a little cocky, sometimes pissy and very opinionated. We thought that would be a funny way to do it. You expect him to be the shy guy in the corner, but he also gets angry. We also talked a lot about Buster Keaton. We liked the idea that a lot of his personality and turmoil is just in his face.”
As the yin to Andy’s yang, Apatow enlisted Catherine Keener, whose happy-go-lucky single mom Trish provided the perfect match for the closeted Carell. It’s a spot of counterintuitive casting that works a treat. “Her name came up and Steve was very aggressive about how she’d be perfect,” adds Apatow. “He just loved her as an actress and I always think that enthusiasm, especially when you’re trying to create a couple, is essential.”
Keener’s formidable screen presence helped. “I also liked the fact that Catherine was intimidating. She’s a very strong woman and I thought that would make for a funny couple. What the movie becomes about is a man who’s seeking sex winding up in a very
complicated adult relationship, and that’s what he doesn’t know how to handle – even more than sex. We felt like someone that strong would add a lot of weight to our story. You also believed they were in love.”
To help lure Andy out of his shell, Apatow gathered an enviable list of emerging comedy stars and memorable bit-players, from Rogen and Paul Rudd to Elizabeth Banks and his own wife Leslie Mann. By giving them free reign to improvise, Apatow laid the groundwork for a filmmaking style that would ultimately become his trademark: the hang-out comedy subgenre.
“It was definitely an opportunity to showcase a lot of people who I felt were the funniest people around who I hadn’t seen in comedies like this,” he says of his ensemble cast. “This was one of Jonah Hill’s first appearances in a movie. He was someone we met while auditioning and instantly fell in love with. Even though he had such a brief moment when he goes into Catherine’s store, we let it play out a little too long just because we loved him.”
Apatow’s who’s-who of comedy cast list didn’t stop there: “Jane Lynch was someone all comedy people knew was the greatest. She came into the audition, improvised, and really rocked us. Elizabeth Banks was early in her career and couldn’t have been funnier,” continues Apatow, detailing Lynch’s role as Andy’s manager and Banks’ turn as an ill-fated love interest. “I’d just worked on Anchorman with Paul so I was excited he was going to be in the movie. Kat Dennings played Catherine’s daughter and crushed it as a nightmare emotional teenager and it was really special for me to be able to shoot the drink-driving sequence with Nicky, as played by my wife Leslie Mann,” he smiles. “We spent about a week on that set-piece and I still talk to Leslie about it all the time.”
Then there was Rogen, Apatow’s muse for his next project, 2007’s Knocked Up. “Seth and I had worked together on Freaks And Geeks and in addition to being hilarious, he also helped me rewrite it and was a great collaborator on the project,” he reveals. “I was thrilled that he scored in such a big way because that’s what made it possible to cast him in Knocked Up. It laid the groundwork for a lot of the work we did after that.”
Apatow’s assembled players provided a treasure trove of content, and fed into the freewheeling style that would become a trademark of the director’s comedy. “We did an enormous amount of improvisation – just because I was scared I wasn’t going to be able to come up with a great version of every scene. I certainly overshot every moment, but as we got into editing we had a tonne of choices,” he admits. “Nobody’s better at that type of improvisation than Steve. It was an embarrassment of riches.”
This off-the-cuff shooting method came into its own during the film’s eye-wateringly funny flagship scene. “We knew we had to do a sequence where his friends try to teach him how to look better for women,” Apatow explains. “We wrote all these different ideas and one of them was that he gets waxed. Steve said, ‘You can just wax me for real – I think it’d be funny if I’m actually in pain,’” laughs Apatow. “We had a rough outline of what we wanted to happen, but it was basically made up on the spot. Seth made a list of all these curses that Steve could scream at the waxer and we just shot everyone’s real horrified reactions.” He pauses to guffaw. “He acted like he’d never had this done before, but years later I realised he must have been waxing in his private life and that’s how he got the idea. He was too knowing.”
Apatow’s feature debut arrived to rave reviews. “We knew it was playing well – the question was: will anyone go to this movie? Steve was not yet a star. At the time, only six episodes of The Office had aired.”
Word quickly spread regardless and before long, Carrell had cemented his status as a leading man. “It was a really fun ride, and the most fun ride of all because it was the first one I got to direct; I’m incredibly proud of it,” says Apatow earnestly. “When we were working on it Steve would be really nice with the crew and everyone on the movie. He would say, ‘I just want to be nice so that if this bombs, people will still want to work with me again.’ I’m so glad that everyone wants to work with Steve again,” he laughs. “It would be a shame if I sunk the whole Steve Carell boat.”