“There were times when I was sore from laugh­ing” – Adam McK­ay on The Oth­er Guys at 10

“I think that movie is maybe the hard­est I’ve laughed on set,” says direc­tor Adam McK­ay, reflect­ing on 2010’s police farce The Oth­er Guys. ​“There were times when I was sore at the end of the day from laughing.”

A decade may have passed since McK­ay teamed up with Will Fer­rell and Mark Wahlberg for this pop­u­lar bud­dy com­e­dy, but the mem­o­ries of the expe­ri­ence are still fresh. Hav­ing helmed Anchor­man, Tal­lade­ga Nights and Step Broth­ers, McK­ay was cer­tain­ly no stranger to strik­ing com­e­dy gold. As the 2000s drew to a close, how­ev­er, the direc­tor saw an oppor­tu­ni­ty to use his brand of humour to send a seri­ous message.

“The idea was always this old con­cep­tion of jus­tice and cops,” McK­ay reveals. ​“We think of cops chas­ing down drug deal­ers and break­ing up smug­gling rings but who cares about that any more with the whole finan­cial sys­tem col­laps­ing and white col­lar crim­i­nals steal­ing bil­lions of dol­lars?” It was this time­ly con­ceit that inspired McKay’s fourth film col­lab­o­ra­tion with Fer­rell, an action com­e­dy cen­tred around two mis­matched detec­tives who stum­ble onto a big case.

Yet while the gung-ho Ter­ry Hoitz (Wahlberg) is keen to do what­ev­er it takes to ensure jus­tice is served, it’s the more-bor­ing-than-beige Allen Gam­ble (Fer­rell) who holds the key to bring­ing down the bad guys. ​“We were try­ing to make it out like the new hero is the paper­work guy who loves to dig into the num­bers,” says McK­ay. ​“Wahlberg’s [char­ac­ter is] obsessed with catch­ing drug deal­ers, hav­ing shoot-outs and fight­ing; his view of law and jus­tice is kind of a dinosaur.”

Fronting McKay’s com­e­dy-with-a-con­science was an unlike­ly but fruit­ful pair­ing. After a brief exchange dur­ing a skit at the 2007 Acad­e­my Awards, McK­ay noticed a chem­istry between Fer­rell and Wahlberg that he was keen to mine. ​“We had din­ner at a lit­tle Ital­ian restau­rant and the two of them just made me laugh. They’re very dif­fer­ent peo­ple, but both of them just made me laugh the whole night.”

Of course, the fun­ny man-straight man com­bi­na­tion is noth­ing new in Hol­ly­wood, and in Wahlberg, McK­ay saw some­one who could more than hold their own against a com­e­dy heavy­weight. ​“We knew from hang­ing out that Mark was fun­ny, and sure enough when we got into it there were a bunch of lines that end­ed up in the movie that he impro­vised. The joke that Allen’s wife, Sheila, played by Eva Mendez, is beau­ti­ful and Wahlberg’s char­ac­ter becomes obsessed with her, he kept impro­vis­ing lines on that. At one point I was like, ​‘Are we doing this joke too much?’ Then I got into the edit room and was like, ​‘Nope! I want to see more of it. He was a natural.”

While The Oth­er Guys became McK­ay and Ferrell’s most tech­ni­cal­ly ambi­tious out­ing to date, the duo didn’t let the well-trod­den frame­work of the bud­dy cop genre impair their style. ​“The idea was to play it real,” says McK­ay, ​“even though there are crazy beats in it, like when we learn about Allen’s past, how he became a pimp with­out know­ing he was a pimp. There’s absurd stuff, but the idea was to play it more real than the oth­er movies we’ve done.”

It also pro­vid­ed Fer­rell with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play a more intro­vert­ed char­ac­ter. ​“I love see­ing Fer­rell play it straight. One of my favourite exchanges is when Allen gives Wahlberg’s char­ac­ter an FBI cof­fee mug that says ​‘Female Body Inspec­tor’. Those are my favourite kinds of scenes.

Indeed, McKay’s love of mix­ing absur­di­ty with the banal result­ed in many of the film’s most mem­o­rable moments, such as one heat­ed back-and-forth between Ter­ry and Allen that takes a wild detour. ​“I was like, ​“Tell him you’re a lion,’ and we just start­ed kick­ing it around,” says McK­ay, who admits he has a habit of yelling increas­ing­ly out-there alter­na­tive lines from behind the cam­era. ​“Will start­ed to play around with it and we just log­i­cal­ly kept tak­ing it fur­ther. That’s how we approach every­thing.” Does this ​‘any­thing goes’ atti­tude make it tricky know­ing when a scene is wrapped? Not so much, says McK­ay. ​“The worst case sce­nario is you don’t use it in the edit room.”

McK­ay had so much fun on set, he even­tu­al­ly found him­self in front of the cam­era, mak­ing a scene-steal­ing cameo as the leader of a group of home­less men. ​“The key to Dirty Mike and the Boys was actor Rob Huebel, who was at the impound telling Allen what hap­pened to his car,” McK­ay explains. ​“Allen’s an old-school cop and loves his lit­tle Prius, so the joke became, what is the worst thing that could hap­pen to it? Rob’s a great impro­vis­er and he came up with a line about a soup kitchen. We were all laugh­ing so hard I was like, ​‘We’ve got to see Dirty Mike and the boys,’ and I think it was Will who said, ​‘You’ve got to play Dirty Mike.’”

Then there’s the cher­ry on the com­e­dy cake: a hilar­i­ous turn from Michael Keaton as Gene Mauch, the police cap­tain and part-time Bed Bath & Beyond man­ag­er. ​“The sec­ond he showed up, he was just the best,” McK­ay recalls. ​“He impro­vis­es, he’s fun­ny, every take is good – he’s the great­est guy. There’s so many takes of him impro­vis­ing that didn’t make it into the movie. My favourite scenes are when he con­fus­es his police job with his man­ag­ing of Bed Bath & Beyond, and when he quotes TLC with­out real­is­ing he’s doing it.”

The Oth­er Guys end with an in-cred­its info­graph­ic loaded with sober­ing stats, yet on release many view­ers seem­ing­ly missed the point. ​“I was try­ing to make the entire movie an alle­go­ry for the finan­cial cri­sis,” says McK­ay, ​“then the movie came out and no one cared. All of mine and Will’s broad come­dies were try­ing to deal with an ele­ment of how Amer­i­ca was falling apart. With Anchor­man it was sex­ism and how the news was becom­ing pure can­dy; Tal­lade­ga Nights was about Amer­i­can pride and Red States. With The Oth­er Guys, it was sup­posed to be obvious]because the finan­cial cri­sis had just happened.”

It was at this point McK­ay decid­ed to dou­ble down, embark­ing on a path that ulti­mate­ly led to him direct­ing 2015’s hous­ing cri­sis dram­e­dy The Big Short and 2019’s Dick Cheney biopic Vice. ​“My feel­ing was, ​‘Alright, we’ve been doing broad come­dies for a while call­ing it out, maybe I need to work on one that’s explic­it­ly about it. The Oth­er Guys was def­i­nite­ly a bridge.”