Bet On Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell

By Gill Pringle

Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell, who star together in The House as a couple that turns their house into an underground casino to pay for their daughter’s college tuition, discuss their own college years, Saturday Night Live and why Will Ferrell looks so good in women’s sunglasses.

The House is the first time that you’ve been on screen together apart from Blades of Glory. Why did it take so long?

AP: We couldn’t agree on the terms.

WF: Yeah – it was an endless negotiation – the terms, we just couldn’t agree on the terms, it was all about the terms. We’d get to the five-yard line and then: Nope!

AP: We had too many requests – too much on each other’s rider!

WF: It just became a thing where: ‘Guess what? Amy capitulated – she’ll do it for what you want’, and then I’d be like: ‘It’s off!’ I was just so used to the back and forth.

AP: We liked the dance more than the movie.

WF: Yeah, we loved the conflict.

AP: But no, I was genuinely really excited to get to play with him…

WF: Yeah, we were always just circling each other.

AP: I guess people were afraid to put us together in a film too good – too much! Too hot!

WF: Too much fire power!

How do you get Jeremy Renner?

WF: You call a bunch of people and you have a long list and 90% of them say no and then someone says: ‘What about Jeremy Renner? He’ll never do it!’ And then he decides he’s gonna do it and you’re like: ‘Wow! That’s great!’

And Jeremy is who you wanted in the first place?

WF: Yes, I would say that on the record.

What’s Amy like when she’s off the clock?

WF: Amy is a dedicated mom and she likes to do normal things, hanging out, going to Farmers Market and kick-boxing. She loves high-adrenaline sports – any time you can get her to jump out of a plane at 20,000 feet.

AP: Like anytime I can use my bird-suit and fly…

WF: But she’s totally normal, she doesn’t joke when she does that.

You both have improv backgrounds. Do you get the script and then think about changing it?

AP: Well it has to be there in some capacity to go ahead and make something because you can’t just assume: ‘Oh, don’t worry we’ll get it on the day.’ So, the story has to make sense to you and you have to get a sense of how you could play a character that’s on the page, but certainly we knew that we would be able to play around once we had an idea of what the scene needed. So much of making a movie is getting the stuff you need to make it, and there was a lot of stuff in this movie that were big action sequences so there were some days when Will and I knew it would just be us standing there talking and we would just be able to goof around and then there would be other days when we would be lighting a man on fire so we would have to get to it.

WF: We had to shut up and let them light the man on fire…yeah.

Will, what is it about women’s sunglasses that you like? You even confessed on Conan your love for them?

WF: That was one of the things going through the script, and we were talking about the fact that at a certain point they would go to this dark side and become The Butcher and The Burner, and we were coming up with their look and I sent Andrew [J. Cohen, director] an email saying: ‘What if Scott thinks it’s so cool to wear, what he thinks are big Italian sunglasses and smoke these cool Italian cigarettes but he’s mistaken and they’re actually women’s and they’re Virginia Slims. I think that they look so beautifully ridiculous but that if you were in the French Riviera, you would see a guy wearing them and you wouldn’t think twice and you would go: ‘Well that guy can pull it off’.

That man would be Will Ferrell because you’re the only guy who can pull it off?

AP: I really really like and respond to that look.

WF: When I did it on Conan, my wife had these big Jackie O. type sunglasses and I thought: ‘I’m going to wear these on Conan and just try to convince the audience that this was the new look’.

Amy, we also heard that your contribution to the movie was peeing on the grass?

AP: That’s right.

WF: Well I find it so endearing that my wife is marking the territory and this is the fun side to her and look what we’re doing in front of our house which is so crazy!

AP: And it’s so funny that we’re peeing on our own lawn – just one house over, we could be peeing on someone else’s lawn! We were on a real street in a real house somewhere.

WF: In the Valley.

AP: We didn’t ask for permission, we just started rolling.

WF: Guerrilla filmmaking.

Please tell us about your own college years. Did you do work, study, and take out student loans?

AP: Yes, I took out a lot of student loans and my parents re-mortgaged our house twice to send my brother and I to school. They were awesome parents. They are both public school teachers and education is really important to them but I remember a lot of late-night hushed conversations about how they were going to pay for school. So, it was not completely out of the realm of my life as to the stress of: ‘what would you do to get your kid into a school that they wanted really badly to go to’.

WF: I had work-study as well. I worked in the Humanities audio-visual department – I checked out cassette tapes to people.

AP: That was your first brush with business!

WF: But once again, I had a lot of student debt and I was writing those cheques for $50 a month which was barely paying off the interest and kind of getting through it, and then I got SNL and I was able to write the final cheque and pay off the rest of my debt so that was great.

Do you have a college fund for your kids?

WF: Yeah. I mean, I think, I’ve been told we have a college fund… But it’s getting so expensive, I hope it’s enough by the time they’re ready…it’s crazy.

AP: What I do with my money is my business! I just put my money in a mail box and some guy picks it up!

Amy, did you have a nick-name at college?

AP: I didn’t!

WF: She wants a nickname badly.

AP: I like to give people nick-names but I don’t have one myself! I’m concerned – for me and my therapist. In college, as well as in high-school, I was what you would call a “floater”. I had a lot of different groups of friends and I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do so I had my improv friends and my gay roommates that I lived with and my Irish-Catholic friends that I grew up with and the English majors that I was thinking about maybe joining at one point – so I was all over the place, just hedging my bets everywhere.

Did you give Will a nickname in this movie?

WF: You kept changing my nickname. At first it was flap-jack and then she would call me The Captain and then Scooter.

AP: And then that turned into Scooter-Pooter and that turned into Put-put and then to Mr Softie and then to Tomahawk Jack and then back to Flap-Jack.

With this crazy political situation right now, do you ever miss being on SNL [where Will played George Bush and Amy played Hillary Clinton]?

AF: We were just talking about how hard that job is and how we don’t miss it…

WF: For all the right reasons. We obviously loved our time on the show and are really thankful for it – one of the best-slash-hardest jobs that you’ll ever do and while you’re in the middle of it, you don’t realise – well, you get in shape to do SNL – it’s like an athlete, and you don’t even think about it at the time; the hours you put in; the rhythm of it; and how your brain is always like: ‘Oooh, I’ve got an idea for next week’ and ‘du-du-du’, and when you get out of that mode and then you stick your toe back into that water – because we’ve both had times where we’ve either hosted or done bits, they’re operating at light-speed, and you forget that: ‘Oh, I used to operate at that same pace’. So, no. I don’t miss it, I don’t miss it.

AP: It’s true, and also, they’ve had a tough job – and they’ve done an amazing job – where they’ve had to take really bizarre true-life things and then have a take on it where usually, a lot of times, it’s like: ‘What is my take on this politician? A lot of people don’t know about this politician or this person. How can I create a character or write these ridiculous things that these people would say and we can all laugh about it?’ But this political season, I mean, you’re dealing with people who are writing their own comedy.

WF: So now if you pitch the things that he tweets and says and does, people would give notes on it and say: ‘It’s just too much; no-one would ever say this’, and so how do you top that? It’s a strange position.

But they did persuade you to return as Bush for the Not the White House Correspondents’ Ball?

WF: No, that was my idea. I knew someone who was working on that show and I heard about it and I thought – ‘God, I’ll be in the east coast; I’ll come down and be a part of that show if you guys want me to.’ So that was fun, to play Bush again and talk about how now he seems like the voice of reason.

Amy, so if Hillary Clinton had been elected would you have said no to reprising your impersonation?

AP: No, well I wouldn’t have, because you don’t really get to take your political impression with you necessarily if somebody has taken over and Kate McKinnon did such an amazing job as Hillary all through this political season. So, when we came back and we did a political sketch together, it was fun because I did a 2008 version of Hillary which was very different than her Hillary but, no… And it is exciting to have, whether it be in the US or the UK, to have a lot of women to talk about and play in politics. Which is why it’s important to have women in positions of power, especially in politics, so that they can also be made fun of.

The House is in cinemas June 29, 2017