Adam McKay said in a new interview with Business Insider that he is “totally open to the idea” of working with Will Ferrell again. The duo behind some of the most beloved comedies of the 2000s (“Anchorman,” “Talladega Nights,” “Step Brothers”) infamously split in 2019 and dissolved their creative partnership, which included the Gary Sanchez production banner they founded in 2006.
“I totally have been open to the idea. We always got along great, we were tremendous creative partners,” McKay said of his former collaborator. “The only thing that caused acrimony between us was when we decided to end our production company, Gary Sanchez. And I know it was reported one way or the other, but that was really it.”
“It’s a shame because we had a great creative partnership,” he continued. “I think both of us underestimated the complications that go with not just having a company, but a very successful company. We had it for a long time and did a lot of cool projects. And Ferrell said it publicly, he was never someone who wanted to produce, so he was always half in and half out, but then he would love it and be proud of the company, but by the end, he wanted to move on. It had become too much extra work; it was never his passion. I was really the one who wanted to produce, but a movie star’s life is very different than a writer-director’s life. So we split up.”
Ferrell told The Hollywood Reporter in October 2021 that “bandwidth” was the reason for his split from McKay, pointing to McKay’s increased producing responsibilities. The actor said at the time: “Adam was like, ‘I want to do this, and this, and this,’ he wanted growth and a sphere of influence, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know, that sounds like a lot that I have to keep track of.’”
But McKay told a different story to Vanity Fair a month later. He said the final blow to his relationship with Ferrell was McKay’s decision to cast John C. Reilly over Ferrell as Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss in the HBO series “Winning Time.” Ferrell was supposed to star in the show, but McKay hired Reilly behind Ferrell’s back.
“I should have called him and I didn’t,” McKay said at the time. “And Reilly did, of course, because Reilly, he’s a stand-up guy…I fucked up on how I handled that. It’s the old thing of keep your side of the street clean. I should have just done everything by the book.”
McKay then revealed that the last time he spoke to Ferrell was the phone conversation they had talking about ending their production company. “I said, ‘Well, I mean, we’re splitting up the company.’ And he basically was like, ‘Yeah, we are,’ and basically was like, ‘Have a good life.’ And I’m like, ‘Fuck, Ferrell’s never going to talk to me again.’ So it ended not well.”
“In my head, I was like, ‘We’ll let all this blow over. Six months to a year, we’ll sit down, we’ll laugh about it and go, It’s all business junk, who gives a shit? We worked together for 25 years. Are we really going to let this go away?’ [But Ferrell] took it as a way deeper hurt than I ever imagined and I tried to reach out to him, and I reminded him of some slights that were thrown my way that were never apologized for,” McKay added.
McKay spoke to Business Insider to mark the 20th anniversary of “Talladega Nights,” which starred Ferrell as the bumbling NASCAR driver Ricky Bobby. The movie is returning to theaters to celebrate the milestone with showtimes on June 28, June 30 and July 1. McKay revealed to the publication that a “Talladega Nights” sequel was discussed after the original’s success, but it never developed beyond the story stage.
“We did have an idea for ‘Talladega Nights 2.’ It was that Ricky Bobby was going to hook up with an F1 team, and he was going to race in Denmark or the Netherlands and feel like he’s in a communist country because they have nationalized healthcare,” McKay said. “So, along with struggling with how fast those F1 cars go, he would have clashed with far-left-leaning Europe compared to America.”
“The only reason we didn’t do it was it’s a lot of work to shoot race car stuff,” the director added. “The reason we went and did ‘Step Brothers’ next was we felt like, can we just go do comedy in a house? We were tired after ‘Talladega Nights.’ It never got to the point where we wrote a treatment.”
Head over to Business Insider’s website to read McKay’s interview in its entirety.
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