Neatly parting his slightly receding hairline, Steve Carell has built his career by lampooning the correspondents of 24-hour news stations. With a whitened and widened smile plastered on his face, Carell looks the part of the trusted anchorman. Still, his humor is as dark as the circles under his eyes.
He’s the star of the runaway hit movie of 2005, The 40 Year Old Virgin. The star of NBC’s Tuesday night UK-remake and white-collar reality TV spoof The Office. He’s had supporting roles in Anchorman, “The Daily Show,” Bruce Almighty and Curly Sue. Yet his name remains shrouded in mystery, not immediately recognizable to even his core fan base of college students by any means.
But in an interview with The Muse, Carell stated rather demurely that he’s an international superstar.
Noting that many upcoming projects include his presence, he continued, “my goal is to become completely overexposed in the next nine months, pack as much in as possible and then sort of disappear in a fiery wreck of a career. That is my ultimate goal, and I have some wonderful agents and managers that set me on that course.”
Self-effacing and modest, the actor found himself at a loss for words when hit with a question concerning his impact on the acting profession.
Stammering, Carell finally concluded after several rambling attempts, “what I’ve brought, I have no idea. I can tell you what other people have brought, and their effect on the culture, but I’m … I’m so new to this that, I don’t think I’ve impacted anything that way. If the movies made some people laugh, that’s … that’s enough for me.”
The roles that Carell chooses seem to be the social outcasts, the jerks, the dimwits. They rarely deserve hero status; even when falling under that title, something still sets him drastically apart from the average Joe, as in his assumption of Andy Stitzer, the leading man in Virgin.
It is surprising that Carell would connect with his characters in any significant way. He seems too nice; he let the interview play out until he had to pick up his daughter at school. He seems too smart; he made witty banter for the hour-long interview. He seems too relaxed; he talked about his college-era exploits.
“I think, and it’s such a cliché, but I think there’s a little bit of yourself in everything you play,” he said. “How much? I couldn’t give you percentages. I am a wonderful human being.”
With a tone teetering between serious and sarcastic, Carell admitted, “I am very generous and warm and loving and I am a good father, and I’m pretty much perfect.”
Even still, he finds Michael Scott, the character he plays on “The Office,” distasteful.
“I hope I’m different than the character I play on [the show],” he said. “I think I would be divorced right now. I doubt my wife would put up with that guy or very long.”
Carell paused for a brief moment before announcing, “I’m probably closer to [Anchorman’s] Brick Tamlin than I am to Michael Scott. I’m fairly, fairly oblivious, so that one was not too much of a stretch for me.”
Carell continued to further himself from Scott, the reluctant boss, clarifying that he was constructed as a conglomeration of boobs and idiots Carell had met in his life.
With a sense of melancholy, he said, “if you don’t know a Michael Scott, then you are a Michael Scott. That’s too scary of a concept to actually reckon with.” m
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