Issue Date: October 28, 2007
Laugh hard with John C. Reilly
The not-so-serious side of the Oscar-nominated, stage-trained, Everyman actor John C. Reilly.
By Steve Pond
In a pricey suburb outside of Los Angeles, two men, dressed in black, stand in the doorway of an imposing mansion. They are brandishing weapons -- a knife, nunchucks, a brick -- while doing their best tough-guy poses. They glare at each other, turn to the camera, 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 making 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 nomination for "Chicago") in some three dozen dramas, from "Boogie Nights" to "Gangs of New 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.
Reilly in Walk Hard
Photo: Gemma La Mana, Columbia Pictures
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"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 Ferrell was the one who called. "He'd obviously been funny in dramas before, 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-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 little 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 theater, I was like, 'Wow, this is what I'm like.' What drew me was the feeling of community, of crazy people like me who like to inhabit other people rather than be themselves."
He'd still rather be known for the people he inhabits than the person he is. Reilly is married 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 L.A. in an unglamorous Toyota Camry. He loves to give his two kids musical history 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."
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 recorded 32 songs for the film and made suggestions to the professional songwriters responsible for his character's oeuvre. "I thought Dewey would make protest records in the '60s, 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 women to take their bras off. I pitched it to the songwriters, and they went away 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 celebrity. 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 people to experience emotion -- that's a good thing. Frequently, people see me and they go, 'I love you!'
"I mean, how can you argue with that? 'You love me? Great! Nice to meet you!' "
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