Steve Carell names the greatest comedy actor of all time: “His brand was so different”
One award that Steve Carell hasn’t won but that he probably should win, is that of ‘actor who is in the most internet memes’.
Which is probably because it doesn’t exist and I just made it up, but nevertheless, it’s a fact that when you’re searching for a suitable gif to illustrate some no doubt hilarious message you just sent, it’s Carell’s face you’ll see over and over again.
Of course, in the main, that’s thanks to his most remembered and most loved character, Michael Scott from the American version of The Office, who had a seemingly unending supply of facial expressions and exclamations to suit almost every occasion.
There’s the “told ya” raise of the glass with a wink. There’s the “NO, god, No” with a grimace. There’s the “Oh my god, it’s happening” panic. There’s the classic cringe face. Anything you want to say, say it with a Michael Scott gif.
But Carell has been busy over the last decade since The Office closed its doors (he actually left the show back in 2011), taking on all manner of role,s both comedic and dramatic, from concerned dad with drug-addicted teenage son in 2018’s Beautiful Boy to a former Vietnam soldier whose son has been killed in Iraq in Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying. You don’t want to be Steve Carell’s son, basically, it would seem.
Carell hasn’t turned his back on laughs entirely, though; he did Battle of the Sexes with Emma Stone, the story of tennis ace Billie Jean King and picked up a Golden Globe nomination for his work on that, and his friend Jon Stewart’s 2020 political comedy Irresistible.
Given Carell cut his teeth on comedy, in years of improv, then on TV with The Daily Show and then in the early 2000s thanks to the raft of Judd Apatow movies like The 40 Year Old Virgin it is not a surprise he has many heroes, and he told Esquire about his driving influences going as far back as when he used to buy comedy albums on vinyl as a teenager.
He revealed: “Especially George Carlin and Steve Martin—over and over I’d listen to those routines. I think what I didn’t realize at the time was that I was studying. I was trying to understand what made them funny, why I enjoyed it so much, what they were doing with the language, what they were doing with the misdirection.”
The latter comedian is someone that Carell has often paid tribute to in public, giving a speech at the 2007 Kennedy Honours ceremony that outlined his admiration and often telling talk show hosts that Martin was a big inspiration when growing up.
Carell added, “Steve Martin in particular, his brand of comedy was so different and so absurdist that I really took to that immediately. But I never thought of myself as particularly funny.”
Martin has paid back the goodwill, making references to Michael Scott’s character in his own smash hit show, Only Murders in the Building and has occasionally admitted that the two ‘Steves’ can get mixed up by people. Meanwhile, Carell is currently filming a new HBO comedy from Ted Lasso writer Bill Lawrence, which is as yet unnamed, and this year appeared in Mountainhead, a film about four billionaires stuck on a retreat while the world is plunged into chaos.
