Ben­nett Miller & Steve Carell: ​‘The make-up became part of the character’

Fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of Peter Sell­ers, Robin Williams and Jim Car­rey, Steve Carell chal­lenges his benign screen per­sona to dis­qui­et­ing effect in Ben­nett Miller’s true crime dra­ma, Fox­catch­er. Carell plays John du Pont, the wealthy wrestling enthu­si­ast whose unhealthy rela­tion­ship with Olympic wrestling cham­pi­ons Mark and Dave Schultz end­ed in tragedy in 1996. Miller and Carell spoke to LWLies about the chal­lenge of devel­op­ing this com­plex character.

Ben­nett Miller: The first time I met Steve I saw a seri­ous­ness and an insight­ful­ness about him. This is a trag­ic sto­ry and Steve’s reflec­tions on the script bore no resem­blance to any­thing you might have seen on The Office. That, cou­pled with Steve’s com­ic styling, I just think was a real­ly kinky cock­tail. My feel­ing about good com­ic actors – not nec­es­sar­i­ly come­di­ans, but com­ic actors – is that they can do any­thing. Maybe it’s an unfair bias in their favour, but if you can do com­e­dy well then the oth­er stuff, giv­en the right cir­cum­stances, is absolute­ly with­in reach.

Steve Carell: One of the things that I found exhil­a­rat­ing was get­ting to explore a dif­fer­ent side of myself. Chan­ning [Tatum], Mark [Ruf­fa­lo] and I kept to our­selves. We grav­i­tat­ed to dif­fer­ent places, phys­i­cal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly. I think we all felt it was bet­ter to not make those per­son­al con­nec­tions. I’m so wary of pre­ten­tious actor talk, of ​“method act­ing” or what­ev­er, but I think it inad­ver­tent­ly became that. I nev­er con­scious­ly set out to sub­vert people’s expec­ta­tions of me as an actor, though.

BM: That’s right, but from the per­spec­tive of you being a com­ic actor we dis­cussed stuff like Scrooge with Alas­tair Sim, who was pre­dom­i­nant­ly known as a comedic actor at the time, and like­wise Peter Sell­ers in things like Being There and also Antho­ny Hop­kins in The Remains of the Day.

SC: Anoth­er thing about Du Pont was that he had such a spe­cif­ic look and I think that con­tributed in great part to how peo­ple treat­ed him and respond­ed to him. He was repel­lent in many ways, phys­i­cal­ly. The make up inad­ver­tent­ly informed me of that when I was on set – I could feel that sense of oth­ers not want­i­ng to be in my com­pa­ny. It’s noth­ing that I had planned on; it wasn’t a pre­con­ceived notion, more an inter­est­ing effect.

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BM: I’m just remem­ber­ing now though some­thing that you did on our cam­era test day, before we began shoot­ing that pos­si­bly could have con­tributed to that feel­ing… The first time Steve appeared on set, it was the first time the crew and the rest of the cast had seen him in full make up. I remem­ber every­one was get­ting into posi­tion, mov­ing lights around and mak­ing last-minute adjust­ments and all of a sud­den Steve’s voice pierced above the din of the set in a very loud, humour­less, sting­ing reg­is­ter, announc­ing, ​“Carell is spelled with one ​‘r’ and two ​‘l’s!” The room was absolute­ly silenced, and that chair dis­ap­peared in a snap. Real­ly, in a near-impos­si­ble feat of prop man­age­ment, his chair came back in what seemed like no time at all with his name spelled cor­rect­ly. That real­ly set the tone mov­ing for­ward. Do you remem­ber that?

SC: I do. It seemed like they went and did it imme­di­ate­ly. I just want­ed to try out the char­ac­ter and see how peo­ple reacted.

BM: Du Pont was this dopey, benign fel­low who could sur­prise you with a hard slap across the face. So the make-up served two func­tions real­ly. But at its most effec­tive it became part of the char­ac­ter and helped peo­ple under­stand the alien­ation he felt because of the way he looked.

SC: Peo­ple treat­ed me dif­fer­ent­ly. Very rarely was I seen out of make-up, because I’d be in it for three hours and I’d be in two hours before every­one got to set, and I’d gen­er­al­ly be one of the last to leave. I always got the sense when peo­ple saw my face that they’d almost for­got­ten I was there.

BM: That absolute­ly hap­pened. It took me a bit of time to accli­mate back to the real Steve Carell, because I nev­er saw him with­out make-up on. It was a 55-day shoot, that’s a long time to spend in someone’s com­pa­ny when they’re almost unrecog­nis­able from the per­son you know.