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Holiday Movie Preview
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Hard
In a pricey suburb outside of Los Angeles, two men,
dressed in black, stand in the doorway of an im
posing mansion. They are brandishing weapons
a knife, nunchucks, a brick while doing their best
REILLY PORTRAIT ROBERT SEBRK FOR USA WEEKEND (SHIRT BY HUGO BOSS. JACKET BY KENNETH COLE. PANTS BY JOHN VARVATOS. SHOES BY ZADK. & VOITAM), WAIKHAM> GEMMA LA MANA. COLUMBIA PICTURES; ALVIN; WTH CENTURY FOX
tough-guy poses. They glare
at each other, turn to the cam
era, shift poses and glare some
more. Then, one of them cracks
a smile, and immediately, Will
Ferrell and John C. Reilly drop
the goofy act, laughing at the
silliness that comes with mak
ing funny movies.
This is hardly the setting in
which you’d picture Reilly, the
stage-trained actor whose good
hearted, sad-sack appeal won
him raves (and an Oscar nomi
nation for Chicago) in some
three dozen dramas, from Boo
gie Nights to Gangs of Neiv
York. Meet the new Reilly, who happened into a career
makeover at 41, when he played opposite Ferrell in
Talladega Nights. Since that 2006 summer blockbuster,
Reilly has found a new life putting his lumbering gait,
kindly Everyman features and improvisational chops
to work in comedies, including Walk Hard: The Dewey
Cox Story, a sendup of musical biopics like Walk the
Line and Ray, due Dec. 21.
“I kind of stumbled into comedy," Reilly says the
next day at a bistro near the Sony Pictures lot, where
he and Ferrell are filming Step Brothers. ‘‘People that
know me have always said. ‘You’re so funny why don’t
you do comedy?’ And I said, ‘Well, someday someone
will call, and I will.’ ”
Longtime friend Fen-ell w r as the one who called.
“He’d obviously been funny in dramas befoi-e, and
[Talladega director] Adam McKay and I thought he’d
be really good in comedies,” Ferrell says. “But when
he first started improvising on the set, I remember
thinking, ‘This guy’s a monster.’ ” In that film’s dinner-
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USA WEEKEND • Oct 26-28, 2007
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‘A | Heilly in
Walk Hard
The not-so-serious side
Oscar-nominated, stage-trained,!
Everyman actor John C. Reilly
By Steve Pond J
table scene, where the characters
discuss religion, Reilly ad-libbed
several of the film’s signature lines,
notably, “I like to picture Jesus like
a mischievous badger.”
Modest and self-effacing, Reilly
tells his story while absently using
his thumb to rub a hole in the paper
mat that covers the tablecloth. As
he rolls the paper remnants into lit
tle balls and arranges the balls in
long lines, he describes how he fell
into acting as a grade schooler on the South Side of
Chicago. “As a kid, I could hang out with the burnouts
or the jocks or the brainy kids, but I never felt like that
was my group,” he says. “But when I came into thea
ter, I w-as like, ‘Wow, this is what I’m like.’ What a
drew me was the feeling of community, of crazy
people like me who like to inhabit other people JB
rather than be themselves.” A
He’d still rather be known for the people V
he inhabits than the person he is. Reilly is mar- T
ried to Alison Dickey, a producer he met some 20
years ago on his first movie, Casualties of War.
He rides the subway in New York and drives
around LA. in an unglamorous Toyota Camry. J
He loves to give his tw-o kids musical history I
lessons: Johnny Cash one day, Woody Guthrie ’
another. And he doesn’t think you should find
any of that interesting. “I still deliberately don’t
tell people a lot of things about my personal ■
life,” he says. “I find it really boring.”
Cover photograph by Robert Sebree for USA WEEKEND; cover photo illustration of Alvin and the Chipmunks by 20th Century Fox
Wardrobe styling by Jennifer Azoulay, Crystal Agency. Cover clothing: shirt by John Varvatos; jeans by Zadig & Voltaire.
Then again, anonymity can get complicated when
you’re the guitar-playing star of Walk Hard, the new
comedy from red-hot producer Judd Apatow: Reilly re
corded 32 songs for the film and made suggestions to
the professional songwriters responsible for his charac
ter’s oeuvre. “I thought Dewey would make protest rec
ords in the ’6os, so I got an idea for a song about women’s
rights called Ladies First, which would completely get
it wrong and just be about wanting w-omen to take their
bras off. I pitched it to the songwriters, and they went
aw-ay for an hour and came back with the song.”
These days, the actor concedes, he’s probably “in a
moment of denial” when it comes to impending celeb
rity. But for Reilly, for now; maybe that’s not a problem.
“I don’t know what it’s like to be somebody like O.J.
Simpson,” the actor says. “But to be famous
for making people laugh or for causing peo
ple to experience emotion that’s a good
L thing. Frequently, people see me and they
k go, ‘I love you!’
“I mean, how- can you argue with that?
r ‘You love me? Great! Nice to meet you!’” EJ
And what’s up with
our other cover boy?
Check out our interview
with Alvin from Dec. 14’s
k Alvin and the Chipmunks at
ifc usaweekend.com
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