Steve Carell In a MovieGuide special, Michael Doherty travels to London to meet a funny man whose roles are getting very serious
Michael Doherty travels to London to meet one of the most versatile actors in Hollywood, Steve Carell
An alumnus of the famed Second City comedy troupe in Chicago, Steve Carell has carved out a strong career as both a comic and dramatic actor. His breakout role was in The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), a hit movie he also co-wrote and executive produced. That same year, he assumed the role of Michael Scott in the hugely popular TV series, The Office. Since then, the actor has balanced roles in top comedies such as Anchorman (2004) and Get Smart (2008) with serious dramas including Foxcatcher (2014) and The Big Short ( 2015), the first of which landed him a Best Actor Oscar nomination.
2019 will see Steve Carell deliver three striking performances on screen. The 56-year-old actor co-stars with Timothée Chalamet in the truelife drama, Beautiful Boy and will play Donald Rumsfeld in Vice, the upcoming biopic of Dick Cheney. But first he takes on the lead role in Robert Zemeckis’ remarkable new drama, Welcome To Marwen. This is the true story of Mark Hogancamp, an American artist who almost died following a vicious assault but subsequently found solace through the creation of a WWII townscape populated by photo realistic dolls.
Michael Doherty: So how did you come to know Mark Hogancamp’s story and what impact did it have on you?
Steve Carell:
I saw the documentary [ Marwencol, 2010] and loved it. I loved so many of the things it had to say about redemption and human perseverance and kindness and hatred. There were so many themes here that I felt were important. I was so moved by it. It was one of those things that got inside of me and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was also taken with Mark as a human being. Here’s a man who was a victim of a hate crime and the documentary depicted his strength and his courage and his kindness. Meeting him in person later on, he exuded a warmth and compassion towards others in the face of everything that he went through. It just added up to something that I wanted to be a part of. I didn’t know if anyone had the rights to it so I did some research and found that Robert Zemeckis owned the rights and had written a script. I contacted him and we got together to talk about it. I really went after this role, because it just spoke to me.
You’ve played a lot of real-life characters but did this one bring with it an extra burden of responsibility, given what this man had been through?
Oh absolutely it did. I felt that there was a real sense of responsibility because he’s so generous of spirit and his story is so unique and real and human. I think it was a labour of love for everybody.
Do you think a lot of people with PTSD relate to Mark’s experiences?
Yes, I think so. Beyond the specificity of his hate crime and why he was beaten up, I think there will be people who will relate to his post-traumatic stress and how he copes with it. His coping mechanism was to create this fantasy world for himself that he could plunge an alter ego into and heal. It’s a fascinating story of resilience and was inspirational to me. That’s why I was interested in it from day one.
It struck me watching your performance that the walk that you created for him spoke volumes about his attitude to life. It was very slow, very deliberate and very cowed. Was that Mark’s own walk or was it something you created to represent his character?
I think it was based on him and what I gleaned from meeting him and watching the documentary. He suffered this traumatic injury so he had to re-learn everything. He had to re-learn speech; he had to re-learn how to walk and to manipulate his hands. He had to start from ground zero. It’s about depicting someone who is struggling physically as well as mentally.
Stepping into Mark’s shoes meant stepping into Mark’s world. How did that feel?
Well, historically, it’s obviously inaccurate. It’s just from his imagination. These are movie versions of the types of characters you would find in the real world. And that again springs from Mark’s imagination. It’s not about being accurate in any way; it’s about being cinematic. It’s like a 1950s World War II movie, something starring William Holden or one of those tough guys. It kind of leans into the stereotypes of that world and I think that’s part of the fun for Mark. I don’t want to speak for him but in terms of his art and in terms of the photographs he’s taking, I think the accuracy is in the emotion. The accuracy is in trying to derive as much human emotion out of these photo-realistic dolls as possible, and he does an extraordinary job of that.
You’ve played some intense and interesting characters this year in movies such as Welcome To Marwen, Vice and Beautiful Boy. Either you’re a great man for reading scripts who knows what he wants by page seven, or you have people around who only filter through the good stuff...
It’s a little bit of both. You get a sense fairly quickly if something is really wrong for you. But it’s weird to even talk about that because I’m so lucky to be getting scripts in the first place. Some of it happens completely by chance.
For example?
Take Foxcatcher ( 2014): the director [ Benett Miller] contacted me because he had me in mind for his part, but it’s nothing that would have ever been on my radar had he not given me a call. And then
there are other things that you can be unsure of, but when there’s a great director involved, you can decide to just jump in and see where it lands. Welcome To Marwen was a labour of love. I fell in love with the story and with Mark. I think he’s such an exceptional human being who was telling this powerful and important story about a man’s struggle for redemption. That really spoke to me. I needed to be part of it in some way.
Is it easy to shrug off strong characters such as Mark Hogancamp or John du Pont in Foxcatcher or Donald Rumsfeld in Vice as you move between projects?
I guess so. Maybe I’m not that Method but, you know, it is just acting! You’re not going through anything even remotely compared to what these people went through. I think it’s cavalier to say, ‘oh, I was too deep into it and I couldn’t remove myself ’. But you take these roles on knowing that this is a real person existing in the world so there is a responsibility there. There was a real weight to playing Mark and everybody involved knew it was important to try to tell this story as truthfully and elegantly as possible. But once it’s over, I think it’s best and healthiest to just kind of let it go; let the filmmakers turn it into whatever it’s going to be and move on to the next thing.
So at this stage in your career, what needs to be in that script before you’re going to take on a project?
I think it has to elicit some sort of response; whether it makes me laugh or whether it touches me emotionally, or whether it just seems like it would be a fun thing to play. Maybe it’s against type or maybe it’s something I haven’t played before. Another thing that’s intriguing to me these days are scripts that scare me. I think it’s always good to be a little frightened by something that’s unknown; to not know whether it’s in your wheelhouse but to try it anyway. I think it’s always good because you learn from it and you can grow from taking on stuff like that. And I think that goes for life, too. The unknown is always a terrifying thing, but once you jump in, it’s usually not as intimidating as you might have thought.
We share a hero in Peter Sellers; an actor who could play many Goon characters, but could also be Chauncey Gardner in Being There ( 1980). Has your own career deliberately taken a similar path?
I am so hesitant to even talk about myself in the same breath as Peter Sellers! He’s one of my biggest, if not my biggest hero. The things he was able to achieve in his career were remarkable. He passed way too soon. That’s a career it’s hard for me to even talk about because I admire him on such a deep level. I marvel at his ability to play anything and play it cleanly without any sort of indication to the audience. He could play Clouseau and never let on that he was there. You never got the sense that Sellers was winking at the audience telling them how funny he thought this was. It was just a man trying to hold on to a sense of dignity. His work in Dr Strangelove ( 1964) or his role as Chauncey Gardner proved that he could go from the broadest comedies to the most subtle dramas and always have a sense of truth and honesty to his work. I marvel at that. It’s definitely something for me to strive towards in my own career.
Welcome to Marwen opens nationwide on January 1