“I started choking”: the traumatising audition that almost ended Steve Carell
No matter how much you might want a part as an aspiring actor, there’s one rule of thumb that you should stick to when auditioning, namely, do not die midway through.
For one thing, it will traumatise the casting director, whereas, for another obvious one, you won’t be able to get the part anyway because you’ll be dead, and this is advice The Office US star Steve Carell will be able to confirm.
Now into his 60s, Carell has had a long old career, even if he didn’t really get into his stride until the Judd Apatow era of the early 2000s, when his lead role in the sex comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin made him a globally recognised face the same year that he had done such sterling work as the absolute idiot Brick Tamland in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.
In the decade or so before he made it big in comedy movies, Carell had been appearing on cable series like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and taking small roles in comedy movies that nobody is likely to be able to name, but such was the life of a jobbing actor trying to make their way in the industry.
The other thing Carell was doing was commercials, plenty of them in fact, and for several years at the start of the 1990s, he was actually fairly recognisable as one of the main faces of McDonald’s, doing regular clips for their newest ‘products’ (as the current CEO likes to call their burgers). But one example nearly ended things for Carell, although he recovered thankfully; otherwise, Gru from the Despicable Me movies would have sounded very different.
He recalled his worst-ever audition to Screen Rant, saying, “I remember I was auditioning for a fast food restaurant commercial, and I had to eat fries for the audition. But it so happened that the fries were a day or two old, and they were very dry. I’m even drying up just thinking about it. And once I ate a couple of the fries, I started choking because they were so dry. I couldn’t even say the lines, and I didn’t get the part.”
Luckily, McDonald’s stepped in to make sure that Carell’s dream, if that’s what it was, of being able to front commercials for burgers wasn’t over at the choking stage. But he was one of those stars whose fame and fortune came relatively late in life; he was indeed 42 when he made that Judd Apatow hit, although probably not a virgin, given he met his wife ten years before that.
Since then, of course, he’s become one of the best-paid comedy actors in the world, as well as picking up several awards for his ‘serious’ roles too. He was Golden Globe-nominated six years in a row for his brilliant work as Michael Scott in The Office, and picked up a ‘Best Actor’ nomination at the 2014 Academy Awards for his gritty wrestling drama Foxcatcher with Channing Tatum.
Most recently, he’s been starring in the lead role in an HBO comedy drama from Ted Lasso writer Bill Lawrence called Rooster, about an author who goes to visit his daughter at college while she deals with a personal crisis, only to become a ‘writer in residence’ who discovers plenty about himself.
