John C. Reilly

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

Only handful of comic actors can successfully make the transition from comedy to drama. Even less can successfully transist the other way around from drama to comedy, but John C. Reilly has proven to be one of the few to pull it off.

He started out with notable roles in films like Boogie Nights , The Hours, Gangs Of New York, and Chicago, the last one garnering him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. However, Reilly soon proved himself adept at comedy, appearing in films like Talladega Nights and Walk Hard.

Now he equally shares the silver screen with another comedic giant Will Ferrell in his latest comedy Step Brothers. It tells the story of Brennan and Dale, two ne'er do well adults who are forced to live together after their parents marry. We asked John whether he felt the film's story rings true of his own real-life experiences with siblings.

'Well, I have a bunch of brothers and Will has a brother,' Reilly says, 'I guess we sort of remembered what it was like and be under the same roof together and all the crazy things that happened and kind of expanded those stories and made them more ridiculous and it became the movie.'

We asked the now 43 year-old actor to share with us some of his own experiences with sibling dysfunction.

'My sisters would fight a lot,' John recalls, 'I'd walk into the room and they would fight and after they left, there was an outline of one of their bodies in the drywall. It was not funny at the time.'

His character Dale is a 40 year-old man who has never worked a day in his life. We asked John how long it took for him to finally leave the nest.

'I was 18. I couldn't wait,' Reilly replies, 'There were so many brothers and sisters, it was like living in an army barracks with kids, so I couldn't wait to have some space that was truly my own.'

Reilly also notes that Step Brothers satirizes a lot of how children are leaving the nest later and later in life as adults.

'It's a real thing, too,' he notes, 'Actually, people say it's happening more and more.'

On the surface, the idea of two grown men bickering and behaving in a fairly infantile manner towards one another may seem like more than the average viewer can swallow. However, John claims the whole experience works in this film due to the sweetness at the core of the characters and the genuine sincerity they bring to them.

'They mean well, so you can get away with a lot if you mean well, when you think about it,' Reilly explains, 'You know, what's funny about the innocence of the characters. I don't know, I assume Will had some of these concerns, but as we went along, as we were making the movie, I was starting to worry. I was like, are we going to come off as these spoiled jerks because we're awfully insolent to our parents and we're ungrateful.'

Reilly adds that he went to great lengths to make sure he felt he and Ferrell were not going too far in how the characters' foibles came off on screen.

'I remember bringing it up when the editors were visiting,' he recalls, 'During the shooting, the editors are one of the few people that have any sense of what the overall picture is while we're shooting. I was like, are we going too far with this spoiled behavior and they're like you guys are so sweet, that you literally could get away with anything, so I'm like, alright. They gave us the courage to continue.'

Step Brothers also reunites John with Will Ferrell, who previously appeared together in Talladega Nights. We asked the actor how he and Ferrell managed to share the comedic responsibilities equally for this film.

'I think we decided like, 'Well, I've done this, so you do it this time.'' Reilly claims, 'I've been in my underwear, Will, you be in your underwear this time. I've sung, you sing this time.' We also asked Reilly whether that sense of shared responsibility affected in any way how he himself approached his own performance in the film.

'I think every movie is its own creation and actually requires its own skill set,' he believes, 'So even though we all worked together on Talladega Nights before and I had done funny work before, like what is required for this character in this moment with this director. I think that's the real truth that you could think that I have my technique as an actor and this is how I do it. Yes, that maybe true, but for the most part, you are trying to learn a whole new way of doing things each time because the chemistry of that particular project demands it.'

'So I can't say that a certain technique really served me other than staying open,' John continues, 'And we have this kind of loose, anarchic democracy amongst ourselves while were working or at least me, Will, and Adam do, sort of, the funniest idea wins, no matter what. No matter who says it, no matter what we're planning on doing, if someone says that makes the other two laugh, we got to do that.'

One particular idea that made John laugh was a scene that involved children being hit by other children. He explained to us the motivation behind filming such an unusual sequence.

'They had everything coming to them, if you know how those kids were,' Reilly says, 'That was a little odd. I remember when we were filming, thinking either this is going to be one of the funniest, most original things I ever done, or it's just going to really turn the audience against us.'

'But most of the people I think that took most of the real hits in that fight were small adults, small people,' he adds, 'The little girl that we used to picked up to hit other little girls with was a stuntwoman.'

In most Hollywood comedies of this era, improvisation is usually par for the course on set. We asked Reilly how much improvisation he and Will were allowed to do.

'The interactions take place in the script, but most of the scenes in the movie, we'd do the scripted version maybe once or twice and then it's pretty much off to the races,' John replies.

'There was literally one day when the executives came down and were literally putting a chain down around my neck,' he then jokes, 'And I was like, 'I'm not a dog. We're in the studio. This hurts,' and they're like 'You're not running anything. You're the actor. This will be muscle memory you'll know of.''

'But because we got them to agree that it was going to be potentially R-rated from the beginning, we were given a lot of freedom,' John adds, 'I mean, as long as you don't cross into X category.'

One particular performance John says he was impressed by was that of co-star Kathryn Hahn.

'I just have to say Kathryn Hahn was just brilliant in my opinion in the movie and I think it's one of those breakout performances,' Reilly notes, 'People will hopefully take notice, because she's incredibly talented. She's on Broadway currently right now doing Boing! Boing!'

'She went places that I wouldn't have gone,' he continues, 'People expect me to do ridiculous things, but for a woman to be that brave about her body in a sexual situation, I thought it was really amazing what she did.'

When asked whether he had seen the final film, Reilly said any worries he had about the film evaporated as the laughter filled the screening room.

'We had a premiere. It was great. It really was,' John replies, 'I was really scared because we had shot so much that part of you is thinking like, is this going to all hang together' What kind of story do you make of all that footage that we shot and then I was really pleased, I honestly was, at the premiere, at how much people were laughing and how consistently it was playing.'

We also asked John whether he felt nervous about Step Brothers being played on the heels of record-breaking box office success by the Batman movie The Dark Knight, especially after his last comedy Walk Hard faced some stiff competition when released during the holiday season.

'It seemed like a good idea at the time, then like three other movies jumped in,' Reilly says, 'We're in the summer of the feeling that people will be sick of humans with super abilities and we're ready for people who don't have the ability to get a job, so now it's kind of like sub-humans.

While John C. Reilly is quickly becoming known for exciting audiences in both drama and comedy, we asked the actor what movies as of late excite him personally.

'I saw Charlie Wilson's War recently and thoroughly enjoyed it,' John answers, 'It was one of the movies actually competing with Walk Hard when it came out. So I hated it when it came out without having seen it and I watched it and I loved it. Phil[lip Seymour] Hoffman was amazing in it.'

'You know what I also liked' Fool's Gold,' he continues, 'I don't know how it did box office-wise or review-wise, but I thought Matthew Mcconaughey and Kate Hudson they were perfectly charming together, those two.'

On a final note, we asked John whether he'd appear in another musical film after having garnered a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod for his work in Chicago.

'A musical' Yeah,' Reilly enthuses, 'There's lots of hope. There's never enough musicals for me. Guys And Dolls. Spread the word, I want to be in Guys And Dolls. I would love it.'