Will Ferrell: Staying Classy - The Biography

by Ryan Hutton

Overview

An in-depth and enthusiastic biography, ideal for all fans of actor Will Ferrell

From playing the school joker as a young boy to shake off the trauma of his parents' divorce to becoming one of the world's most bankable movie stars, Will Ferrell has always used comedy as a way to bring happiness to others. He doesn't care if you laugh at him or with him—if you're laughing at all, then he's done his job. From Saturday Night Live to Elf, Starsky & Hutch, Austin Powers, and Step Brothers, the list of comedies Will Ferrell has been involved in is endless. Will Ferrell has earned himself a huge and devoted fan base, particularly with smash hit Anchorman, which has established a legendary cult following.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782197645
Publisher:	John Blake Publishing, Limited
Publication date:	09/01/2014
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.80(d)

Read an Excerpt

Will Ferrell

Staying Classy â" the Biography

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By Ryan Hutton

John Blake Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Ryan Hutton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78418-036-2

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CHAPTER 1

WHEN THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY

The accepted wisdom is that comedians are not what they appear to be. Beneath that smile and wit that leaves audiences gasping for breath as they cry tears of laughter is a twisted knot of neuroses and low self -esteem.

The accepted wisdom is that comedians have come to rely on humour as their protector – their shield that has manifested itself from a childhood filled with taunts from classmates and a troubled domestic life.

That is the accepted wisdom.

Will Ferrell, who was born John William Ferrell on 16 July 1967 in Irvine, California, is a comedian. In fact, he's arguably the most famous funnyman on the planet. And he's the exception to the accepted wisdom.

On paper, he seems like every normal comedian. He wants to make people laugh. He has a desperation to do so, and has left no stone unturned finding ways to do just that. He has pretended to be like a cat, he has stripped off several times, exposing his flabby flesh to the millions, he has pulled faces, endured physical pain and spent hours upon hours obsessively making sure his comic creations were just right for public consumption. But the personal demons that plague other comedians never quite materialised. He wants to make people laugh. That's it. As he has said before in an interview to About.com, 'A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have racked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.'

He was born to two caring parents – Betty Kay, a former schoolteacher, who taught at Old Mill School and Santa Ana College, and Roy Lee Ferrell, Jr, a musician with The Righteous Brothers. The group, with vocals from Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield, had several hits including 'Unchained Melody' and 'You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling'. Forming in 1962, they split up after six hugely successful years together, but the two singers failed to find the same success as solo artists. They eventually reunited six years later.

Will said about his parents to AintItCoolNews.com: 'It's funny because my Mom and Dad actually have a very good sense of humour. Also, I wasn't your typical class clown or anything like that growing up, but if anyone dares me to do anything, I'll do it in two seconds ... if I feel like it.' He added: 'I kind of had a relatively normal upbringing, so there are no real traumas to look back on. No bitter, tortured comedian here. Maybe it's just that growing up in suburbia, sitting back for no other reason than wanting to analyse things comedically. Maybe it just comes from that general boredom you sometimes get.'

Betty and Roy both came from Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina – a town in Halifax County which is located near the Roanoke River. They met in second grade, and fell in love – and decided to move to California in 1964. Will said to Premier Magazine: 'Dad's a musician. He's keyboard, saxophone, and vocals. And I kind of watched the entertainment industry though his eyes and his experiences – the ups and downs of life in nightclubs. He came out here initially, then he brought my mom, and they lived down in San Juan Capistrano at a motel. Dad played music and Mom was a cocktail waitress.'

Despite moving to the Golden State, Betty made sure her hometown formed an integral part of her children's childhood. Will and his younger brother Patrick regularly headed to Roanoke Rapids during summer visits to see his Uncle Bill in Lumberton, an aunt in Cary, and another aunt in Raleigh.

While Will is more adjusted than other comedians, he was still prone to using humour to deflect moments of weakness. When he was eight years old, his parents divorced – a traumatic situation for any child. However, Ferrell, no doubt bruising inside, chose to show a different facet in front of people, looking at the bright side and telling everyone that he was delighted, because he would now have two Christmases.

The strain from his father's showbiz job – which saw him touring for months on end – has often been cited as the reason for the marriage breakdown. And the long patches of not seeing his father would have understandably caused Will to look at the world of showbiz with some concern. He said to Front Row, 'In looking back, it's what I always wanted to do. But I was suppressing that urge because it was unthinkable. It's too hard to get into comedy, acting, movies or whatever –too unpredictable. My father's a musician, and I had seen how he could work at a nightclub for a year and then come home one day and be like, "Well, they said the job is over." "What happened?" "Nothing, they just said they are going in a new direction." And I thought, "That's no way to live." So I was dead set, like the rational part of my brain, even as a little kid I was saying, "I'm going to get a real job." I didn't know what that was, but I had the image of walking around with a briefcase. That was having a real job.'

As traumatic as a parental split can be for the children, it seems both parents successfully ensured that Will and his brother were loved, and that the impact it had on them was as minimal as it could be. Will's sunny disposition certainly helped the parents cope with the upheaval. But his anger did come out every once in a while. A neighbour had to repair a window after young Will reacted with fury when a kid took the seat off his Big Wheel, with Will grabbing the seat back and throwing it at the kid, only for it to whizz past him and smash through the neighbour's window. He also shoplifted once, stealing a spare pack of Monopoly money from a local drugstore after he grew frustrated that there weren't enough 500-dollar notes in his board game. It was the first time he stole, and the last. (Rolling Stone, 6.3.2012)

Irvine is a city in California, and one that has developed a reputation as one of the best places to live in America. In fact, because of its good schools and jobs it was ranked as the fourth best place to live in the United States. Irvine was a safe place to live – the kind of suburban utopia that were seen in the early films of Spielberg – a place where kids could roam outdoors and goof off without getting in too much trouble. The city's mission statement is to 'create and maintain a community where people can live, work, and play in an environment that is safe, vibrant, and aesthetically pleasing'. Will said (Orange County Register, 23.7.2008) about his hometown: 'Growing up in suburbia, in safe, master-planned Irvine, there was no drama so we had to create it in our heads. My main form of entertainment was cracking my friends up and exploring new ways of being funny. I didn't have to have the survival mode instinct like other comics, who grew up in tough neighbourhoods. I had the opposite. For me, I grew up in Mayberry, and the humour broke the boredom. And there was a lot to make fun of.' He also added: 'The Irvine PD [Police Department] loved giving bike tickets because they didn't have a lot to do. That always amused me.'

He attended school at Turtle Rock Elementary, before going on to Rancho San Joaquin Middle School. In first grade he learned a trick, something that would yield an increase in popularity instantly. He would open a door and have it hit the bottom of his foot, but by snapping his head back at the right point, it would look like the door had smashed him in the face. Perfecting the move saw him make the other kids laugh, garner new friends and even serve as an icebreaker with girls. Humour was a way for Will to test himself – to see how far he could go. Once he turned up at high school in his pyjamas just to see if he actually had the nerve to go through with it. Ignoring the occasional sneers and negative attitudes from classmates, he honed in on the ones that he made laugh, reasoning that they were the ones in the majority and that he made more friends with his humour than not. In an interview with Orange County Register, he said: 'I was never a class clown or anything like that, but I do remember being in the first grade and my teacher, Mr Chad, told the class one day that we were going to do some exercises. He meant math exercises, but I stood up and started doing jumping jacks. To this day, I don't know what possessed me to do that, but all my friends cracked up. That was invigorating. Of course, later it was all about making girls laugh.' He also explained to NewsOK.com: 'I was a good student, and yet, I describe myself as a conscientious class clown. I would have fun up to a certain point, and then if the teacher gave me a dirty look, I'd be like, "I gotcha," and I'd back off.'

Comedy was something that he grew up with – admitting to the website Den of Geek: 'I think I got a general love of comedy from my parents in a way. And then I loved the first, original cast of Saturday Night Live. I just thought that was a collection of five or six comedic actors that were so good that it's amazing to think they were on the same cast. ... My dad turned me on to Peter Sellers as a kid. I loved the fact that he was a unique combination of being extremely subtle and over-the-top all at the same time, and that's a hard thing to do. I admire that. The other influence is Steve Martin. When he came on the scene, he was doing silly comedy that didn't follow a linear path – if you were to write down what he was going to do, it wouldn't make sense. I think that's inspired my generation, and it's happened a lot of times when writing a script, and the studio ... [In Anchorman] DreamWorks wanted to take out the Steve Carell character, Brick Tamland. "He doesn't make sense! Every time he speaks, he doesn't make sense! Lose that character." But that was the point. That's why he's in there.'

He added: 'I used to love watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Anytime there was a comedian, I'd try and watch it. Obviously Saturday Night Live – Dan Aykroyd was my favourite. I like that he was so versatile and yet he could support and could be really funny. He could kind of do anything. Another person I'm a huge admirer of is Tom Hanks just because he's the Jimmy Stewart of American cinema right now. Everyone forgets that he started out on Bosom Buddies. And he's a good dramatic and comedic actor as well. It'd be fun to do that kind of transition. Kind of what Jim Carrey's trying to do. That'd be great if you can make that jump and people allow you to. Phil Hartman too in the same respect as Aykroyd.'

During senior year, Ferrell would perform several comedy routines over the school's intercom system with his friend. 'I'd be up late at night writing them. I never ad-libbed,' he remarked. Writing his material, and receiving the blessing from his principal, Will began to hone his talent – adding to it by performing routines in the school's talent shows, winning the Best Personality honour in a vote by classmates. In an interview with Front Row magazine, he remarked: 'I just loved comedy, I really did. I just started making my friends laugh; I always had a funny group of friends. We'd just do stupid stuff. We were the kids who instead of going to the high school party and getting drunk and drinking all the beer, we were going into the person's freezer and defrosting his parents' frozen food and handing it out to people. Just doing weird, bizarre, almost Andy Kaufmanish stuff to entertain ourselves. And I think that's what fostered my "style", if you will.'

It's no surprise that he favoured the wild antics of Andy Kaufman, the late trail-blazing comic who was famous for antagonising his audience and deliberately incurring the wrath of diners in restaurants by walking up to a couple and demand she leave the man to go with him because 'he was famous' – something she would do – leaving fellow diners open-mouthed in shock and having to comfort the broken-hearted man, not realising that it was all a well-organised joke – something the diners would never know. Will told Index magazine: 'I love Andy Kaufman. When I first heard about him reading The Great Gatsby from cover to cover on stage, I was like, "God, that would be so much fun to do!" I love that kind of thing. It's really fun to make people laugh, but there's a small part of me – about 20 per cent – that doesn't care if the audience thinks something is stupid. I get almost as much pleasure out of that kind of reaction. In a twisted way, I enjoy it when I'm doing a sketch and it's just bombing. It makes me want to slow down and take my time, like, "If you hate it this much, I'm going to make it last even longer."'

When asked by Rolling Stone magazine whether he has ever had adolescent angst or self-loathing, he said: 'No way, not even close.' In the same magazine, he recalled an embarrassing encounter with his mother after she feared that he had slept with a girl that she didn't approve of. He hadn't, but she still insisted that if he had, he had best put a 'condom on that pecker of yours'. Despite his reputation for acting the fool, Will was not bullied at school – mainly because of his size and sporting prowess. At University High School in Irvine, Will Ferrell was a field-goal kicker for the school football team. He would spend hours and hours kicking a football through goal posts, requiring him to be in, as he puts it, a 'Zen-like meditative state'.

He said to the A.V. Club: 'I played a lot of soccer, and then they needed a field-goal kicker, and then I found myself on the varsity team as a sophomore. It's a high-pressure, high-stakes position, unless you play for the high school I went to. We were 1-8-1 my senior year, so not a lot of field goals kicked. I think it was four for six. It was just six attempts the whole year. Adam McKay [future director of many of his films] always jokes, because he feels I'm very good under pressure, or I would never break when we were doing Saturday Night Live – he was like, "it's 'cause he's a field-goal kicker".' Sport would play a big part in his life in his formative years – thanks mainly to his mother who believed he was the perfect size for playing soccer. A strapping lad, he excelled at soccer and he was also the captain of the basketball team while at high school.

In 1986, he graduated from University High School – alongside other notable alumni that included Dita Von Teese. His pals, so used to Will's zany antics reverberating around the town in Irvine, expected their funny friend to make a name for himself far outside the reach of a small town. Comedy wasn't quite ready for him yet, however. Instead he enrolled at the University of Southern California, studying Sports Broadcasting. He said: 'By the time I was ready for college I didn't know what to do. I think I secretly wanted a show-business career, but I was suppressing it. I liked watching sports so I went in that direction at USC.' (Orange County Register, 23.7.2008) He couldn't keep his joking side clear, however. Examples included streaking round campus, and dressing in a janitor's outfit and walking into his friends' classes. He remarked to HamptonRoads.com: 'I'm not a dance-on-the-tables kind of guy. I mean, in college I was known to streak a few times, but I don't need to do that stuff. But if someone dares me to do it, I'll do it in two seconds. It's not that big a deal.'

Asked what was his craziest USC campus memory, Will replied to AboutMovies.com: 'Let's see, I had a fair amount. I had a work-study job in the Humanities AV [Audio-Visual] Department. I was in charge of checking out tapes and overhead projectors and things like that. No one really kept track of where I was. I could leave my job at any time and what I would do on occasion is I would find out what classroom certain friends were in and then dress up as a janitor and show up in the middle of class. There was one specific class that I would do it to. I don't know if they have Thematic Option there any more, but it was kind of a high-level English class and the teacher actually encouraged me. He would see me on campus and say, "Come by in two weeks and just screw around." I would stand outside the door with a power drill and just pretend like I was working on stuff, so I'd do stuff like that.'

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Will Ferrell by Ryan Hutton. Copyright © 2014 Ryan Hutton. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
CHAPTER ONE WHEN THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY,
CHAPTER TWO STAYING GROUNDED,
CHAPTER THREE LIVE FROM NEW YORK,
CHAPTER FOUR SHOWING HIS COMEDIC POWER,
CHAPTER FIVE TAKING THE LEAD,
CHAPTER SIX LENDING A SUPPORTING HAND,
CHAPTER SEVEN THE NEW CLASS,
CHAPTER EIGHT FESTIVE FUN,
CHAPTER NINE I'M KIND OF A BIG DEAL,
CHAPTER TEN WILLING IT BIG AT THE BOX OFFICE,
CHAPTER ELEVEN GETTING SERIOUS,
CHAPTER TWELVE REVVED UP,
CHAPTER THIRTEEN REBOOT CAMP,
CHAPTER FOURTEEN SKATING ON THIN ICE,
CHAPTER FIFTEEN BROTHERS IN ARMS,
CHAPTER SIXTEEN LOST AT THE BOX OFFICE,
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN A COP OUT,
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN EVERYTHING MUST GO,
CHAPTER NINETEEN GETTING POLITICAL,
CHAPTER TWENTY STILL CLASSY,
Plates,
Copyright,