Interviewing Will Ferrell and Will Arnett at the same time can have its enjoyable challenges. Like getting a straight answer out of either of them. Sometimes, it’s just better to let them talk.
“That’s a really good, fantastic question,” Ferrell replied at one point. “One I was not prepared for. [Expletive].”
Both men were in Boston on February 13 promoting the upcoming New Line comedy Semi-Pro. The film plays on an old concept: a weak sports team finds new reason to succeed and must beat tough odds to reach victory. Movie fans may find the familiar premise lacking freshness. So, too, at first, did the filmmakers.
“Arnett took me aside and said, ‘This is not fresh,'” Ferrell said.
“The first day I walked on the set, it stunk,” joked Arnett, who plays sports commentator Lou Redwood and played Gob on Arrested Development. “It literally was not fresh in the building. I said, ‘It smells like Major League in here. With a dash of Tin Cup.'”
But everyone loves a “come-from-behind story,” Arnett said, and Semi-Pro’s Flint Tropics are even bigger losers than most sports underdogs. The worst team in the ABA, a real-life ’70s basketball league, the Tropics must quit playing or join the NBA by raising their rank.
“It’s not [a competition] to win at all,” said Ferrell, who stars as Jackie Moon, a one-hit-wonder artist who owns, coaches, and plays power forward for the Tropics. “It’s literally for fourth place. So, there’s a little bit of a twist there.”
Another twist comes from the film’s setting — in the 1970s. Ferrell last visited the decade with Anchorman, and though his new film only needed the era for the ABA hook, the “intrinsically funny” decade throws Semi-Pro some easy laughs.
“Just because it’s so foreign to us now that people actually looked, dressed [that way], had different attitudes,” he said. “That’s always a funny phenomenon.”
Basketball was different in the ’70s, so though the Tropics presumably began their career someplace warm, Michigan seemed their logical final home.
“Flint was a great backdrop for this team,” said Ferrell. “It was also very characteristic of what type of markets they had in the ABA. They went to obscure places so it made kind of comedic sense.”
The ’70s gave Ferrell the character Jackie Moon, who’s been selling the film by appearing as an independent character. As Moon, Ferrell endorses deodorant and beer on TV, sells his single, “Love Me Sexy,” on iTunes and shares a Sports Illustrated photo shoot with Heidi Klum, making him the first man to grace the magazine’s annual swimsuit spread.
Being Moon also let Will Ferrell do what the conventional wisdom said he couldn’t: grow an afro.
“That was six months of focusing on hair growth,” he said. “And I did it. A lot of people said it couldn’t be done.”
“I don’t think anybody really had an opinion on it,” Arnett interjected.
“No, there was a lot of blogging going on. ‘Can he grow it out?’ ‘I don’t know.'”
“A lot of chatter about it?” Arnett asked, incredulous.
“A lot of chatter,” Ferrell responded. “I would start a lot of it. I have over a hundred email surnames . . . so I will constitute a lot of my own chatter. I affect a lot of polls.”
