  Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction
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HOLLYWOOD -- It's a sad day when Will Ferrell doesn't feel comfortable wearing his pyjamas in public anymore.
Yet the 39-year-old comic actor -- who once showed up to high school in button-up flannels just to see if he could "withstand the withering glances" of his classmates -- admits the omniscient vloggers of YouTube have made him sheepish about repeating such off-screen shenanigans. (Making an ass out of himself on-screen remains perfectly acceptable -- and lucrative.)
"I find myself in situations now where I would've let loose a little more, but I don't," Ferrell tells the Sun. "I used to go to a game and heckle and be part of that whole fun ritual, but now I won't because it will be written somewhere that Will Ferrell was heard shouting obscenities."
He remembers doing press in London when an interviewer told him he'd just seen Ferrell drunk at a party on YouTube.
"I literally checked out for the rest of the interview because I was thinking 'I have to look into this.' And, of course, (it turns out) it's not me, it's just some guy in the dark and he's walking out of a club and his friends are pretending it's Will Ferrell. It does make you, in this era of camera phones, a little leery at times."
As for the pyjamas-in-class experiment, he says the experience "was a good test psychologically ... I think that laid the groundwork (for me) to being committed to character. Once I lock into something, I'm that person."
It's this bit of alchemy that probably explains why Ferrell in person -- without elf tights or NASCAR duds to hide behind -- is far from the boorish persona he's exploited to great comic effect in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and this summer's Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.
(One presumes the same unhinged moxie it takes to attend school in your pyjamas is required when streaking across the big screen, as Ferrell famously did in 2003's Old School.)
Dressed in a conservative suit and sitting attentively during a sit-down chat with the Sun at the Four Seasons, Ferrell is soft-spoken, thoughtful and even shy -- exhibiting the same reserved qualities that make his casting in Stranger Than Fiction as inspired as it is unlikely.
In the surreal dramedy, opening Friday, Ferrell stars as dullard Harold Crick, an IRS auditor whose mirthless existence is disrupted when a voice only he can hear begins to narrate his life in uncanny detail.
The voice, he discovers, belongs to the author of a novel in which he's the main character. If this wasn't absurd enough, Crick soon discovers the writer (Emma Thompson) intends to kill him off.
As he attempts to prevent his own demise -- in this effort, he enlists a literary professor played by Dustin Hoffman -- Crick also falls in love with the free-spirited bakery store owner he's auditing (Maggie Gyllenhaal).
Is it a comedy? A drama? A tragedy? The joke of Zach Helm's script is that, even as moviegoers may be puzzling over this, so is Crick.
Directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland), Stranger Than Fiction, with its themes of fate, death and taxes, marks Ferrell's first foray outside the realm of fratboy hysterics. The aim, one assumes, is to manoeuvre Ferrell into the same rarified space occupied by Tom Hanks, whom audiences will accept in both comedies and dramas.
It's no easy task -- just ask Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler, who have both struggled to achieve a similarly lofty perch.
"It's human nature to try to change it up. I really admire the Johnny Depps of the world, who are able to do all these different things," says Ferrell, adding, "I would like to broaden my audience for Danish porn as well."
Not that Ferrell was automatically destined to land the part, despite his box-office clout.
The project, one of the most talked-about in town, had made Harold Crick a coveted role in Hollywood, with A-listers circling to star.
Recalls producer Lindsay Doran, "What we loved about Will is that there's an ordinaryness to him. He looks like a guy who could work in an office with a million other guys who look just like him.
"There's not many movie stars you can do that with -- they're too glamourous, they're too handsome. In person, he's very, very funny, but he's not nuts. He has this lovely self-effacing quality."
Hoffman concurs, "the first thing I felt about him was I thought he was very shy and guileless and, of course, his character is guileless, too ... Will says, 'Gosh.' He really does say, 'Gosh.' "
Even Ferrell sees the parallels between himself and Crick.
"It was easy to tap into (Crick) only because I had moments where I thought if I wasn't acting and doing what I do, and if I had a career in the private sector, and if I didn't have a family, I do have tendencies where I could have a monastic existence and be OK with it .... I identified right away with Harold Crick ... I was lucky (director Marc Forster) decided on me -- after Russell Crowe fell out."
This is the exception to the rule, of course -- Ferrell, coming off Talladega Nights, has no shortage of projects being offered to him daily.
"Most of the stuff are offers where they say, 'Please do this and change whatever you want' -- which usually means it's not very good."
And while Stranger may open the door to more dramatic roles, Ferrell will next be seen on familiar turf -- or ice.
In March, he plays a male figure skater opposite Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder in the comedy Blades of Glory. After that, he'll star in the basketball-themed farce Semi-Pro.
"It's completely by chance I'm going from race cars to ice skating to now basketball. We even tried to flip some things around ... but there just happened to be some funny ideas circulating around sports. There's no conscious decision to it, other than the luck of the draw."
Or fate, as it were.
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