Chazz Michael Michaels (Will Ferrell) and Jimmy MacElroy (Jon Heder) are the two top leading figure skaters in the men’s singles category. When they tie for the gold at the 2002 World Figure Skating Champion, their rivalry heats up and the two engage in an all out brawl in front of the entire packed stadium. As a result of their poor sportsmanship, the guys are banned from men’s singles competition for the rest of their lives. Three years after the incident, the two are still upset by the situation and can’t take not being in the limelight. Fortunately for them, an obsessed fan finds a loophole that will let them reenter into the competition. The only catch is the guys must put asides their differences and become a team in order to now become the world’s best duo in pairs figure skating.
ComingSoon.net talked to Ferrell and Heder about what it took to become the world’s top skaters in Paramount Pictures’ comedy Blades of Glory.
ComingSoon.net: We have to talk about crotch proximity ’cause you guys got very close to each other. Did you have to set any boundaries?
Jon Heder: The contract said, “No less than 2 centimeters.”
Will Ferrell: I had a restraining order against his crotch. We really didn’t talk about it, did we?
Heder: I think, all in all, it ended up being mostly effects.
Ferrell: That was a stunt crotch. I don’t think I touched his crotch.
Heder: I even think the upside legs was actually fake. It wasn’t even someone else’s.
Ferrell: Oh, really?
Heder: Remember?
Ferrell: Movie magic.
CS: Which was harder to negotiate, the crotch proximity or the boob grabbing with Jenna Fischer?
Ferrell: Well, the boob grabbing. That was ad-libbed. I just thought, “This will be fun, I’m just going to do it,” and 80 takes later… [Laughs] I had to get it right. And, it remained in the movie.
Heder: As soon as you did the first establishing shot, you had to match that.
CS: Did you know each other beforehand? You have such a great rapport. Did that happen as soon as you guys met?
Ferrell: It was instantaneous, wasn’t it?
Heder: I was just [in awe]. When we first met, it was on the ice and we were on level playing ground. All bets were off.
Ferrell: Right, right.
Heder: I think we were just scared.
Ferrell: Yeah. We met in the parking lot of Pickwick Ice Rink in Burbank. It was like, “Hey, nice to meet you.” “Yeah, you too.” “This should be fun, right?” “It’s going to be hard, huh?” “You don’t know how to skate, do you?” “No.” “I don’t either.” “Okay, I’ll see you later.” [Laughs] That was kind of it.
Heder: I was like, “I’ve got to lift you?”
Ferrell: “No, I think I will be doing the lifting. I have to lift you.”
CS: Now that you know how to skate, who loves it and who hates it?
Heder: I love it.
Ferrell: He does. He loves it. I don’t hate it.
Heder: He doesn’t hate anything.
Ferrell: But, yeah, I haven’t skated since the movie. But, he’s only skated once.
Heder: I’ve gone only once since because I’ve been busy.
Ferrell: He’s a big talker. He was like, “I’m going to skate all the time.”
Heder: And, I am. I’m going to. [Laughs] And, by all the time, I mean that I’m going to try to make it a regular, once a month to semi-annual thing. [Laughs]
CS: Will, can you tell us something about Jon that we would not know? And, Jon can you tell us something about Will?
Ferrell: Let me see… Jon has a twin brother. Did you know that?
CS: I did.
Ferrell: Oh, shoot. [Laughs]
Heder: Everybody knows that.
Ferrell: Well, his twin brother is really mean. Jon’s nice, but this guy — he scares me.
Heder: He’s the evil one.
Ferrell: He’s the evil one. And, he would come to set and he wouldn’t even talk to me. He’d just sit across the room and go (does an evil laugh). I was like, “What is he doing?,” and Jon was like, “That’s just my evil twin brother, don’t worry about it.”
Heder: He’ll mess with you, but it’s not a big deal.
Ferrell: So, that’s something about Jon. [Laughs]
Heder: Will doesn’t grow facial hair. It’s all down here (points to Will’s chest).
Ferrell: Yeah.
Heder: It all goes there. He never had to shave.
Ferrell: For some reason, the beard follicles are actually right here, over my breasts, so I grow a chest beard. So, I have to shave that down. So, those are two things. Jon didn’t know I was left-handed.
Heder: That’s true. Are you?
Ferrell: Yeah.
Heder: [Laughs] I didn’t know that, but neither did they.
CS: Speaking of the chest beard, when you get a script, do you immediately try to find the scene where you get to take off as many of your clothes as you possibly can?
Ferrell: No. I actually hope that there isn’t.
Heder: He gave it to me.
Ferrell: Yeah, I gave it to Jon this time. But, yeah, in this one, I kind of do a version of it with the tattoo thing, which I thought was really funny that you reveal this stupid life story through tattoos. [Laughs] But, we got to make some crazy, funny tattoos. That was amazing. And, in fact, we were just laughing that Jimmy has no sense of the fact that there’s this gross guy with his shirt off. He’s just wrapped in the story, like “Really, wow, cool. What’s that one?”
Heder: And then, Chazz gets the tattoo of Jimmy.
CS: Were you tempted to keep that one for awhile?
Ferrell: I was. That was the funniest thing. The make-up tattoos are so real looking and they last for a good couple of days, so I would forget. On the weekends, I’d have these weird tattoos. My wife would be like, “Oh, gross, what is that?” “It’s just a wolf. I’m the lone wolf.”
CS: So, the spandex skater costumes vs. the elf suit — compare and contrast.
Ferrell: Well, they were very similar. The elfin tights were actually quite functional. A lot of times, in that movie, it was very cold where we were filming, so I was actually thankful to have them. The lycra suits, I was thankful to have them in a different sense, just for the character, ’cause they were funny looking.
Heder: It took some help to get into. But, you didn’t have to wear a dancer’s belt in elf, did you?
Ferrell: No, I did.
Heder: You did?
Ferrell: Yeah. I had already experienced it, yeah.
Heder: So, he was totally just being nice to me when I had to wear a dancer’s belt for the first time. You were obviously trying to make me feel better by saying, “Yeah, these really suck, don’t they?” You were used to them. [Laughs]
Ferrell: I didn’t want you to feel left out.
CS: Did you want to draw the line with the fluffy thing on the butt of the peacock costume?
Heder: I remember seeing it in the design, but I always forgot about it because it’s so light, and I never saw it. People would say something and I’d be like, “Oh, that’s right, I’ve got feathers back there.” So, no, I did not draw the line.
CS: How much input did you guys have on your costumes?
Ferrell: We had a little bit. Julie Weiss, who’s the wardrobe designer is kind of a mad genius, in a way. She’d be like, “I found this leather jacket in the hatchback of my neighbor’s car. Try it on.” [Laughs] You’d be like, “Oh, it’s perfect.” “I knew it! You’re going to wear that today.” [Laughs] She really designed these amazing [costumes]. She would call me on the phone and ask me things like, “What would your character keep in a duffle bag?” [Laughs] “I don’t know yet. I haven’t even thought about it.” She was like, “I see you as a cross between Steven Tyler and…” this person or that person. But, yeah, in terms of the skater stuff, she totally designed all that.
Heder: The peacock outfit was kind of my idea because we had seen clips and footage of other skaters, just to study and research, and Johnny Weir had this swan outfit. It was kind of a famous routine. It was very serious, but the glove was a swan, and I was like, “That would be funny to do, but do it as a peacock.” Skaters are very much like peacocks. It was amazing. I just remember throwing that idea out, and then, the next thing I knew, she had this bejeweled glove and the eye, and everything. It was like, wow!
Ferrell: The first time I saw him in his outfit, I was really jealous. [Laughs] I was like, “Aw, you’re a peacock. Of course. You get a gloved hand and everything. I’m only fire.”
Heder: But, he had fire coming out of his hand. That was pretty cool.
CS: How was the chase on dry land?
Ferrell: That was really hard. We were saying in the other room, that was the first two days of filming, all of that chase and we hadn’t really worked out being on those skates at all.
Heder: Did you have covers at all or was it just straight metal blade?
Ferrell: No, it was like a piece of wood that was painted silver on the side so it looked like a blade but it was still only about that much thickness that we were running around on. And it was the craziest way to begin a movie. You felt really beat up after those first few days of all that physical stuff, but it was fun.
CS: How important is the hair of the character?
Heder: I loved it. I love hair. It’s very important.
Ferrell: I would say the same thing.
CS: How does it help you find the essence?
Heder: I think so much of the look, obviously including wardrobe, but the hair is a huge thing because it’s basically the frame for your eyes and that’s the window to your soul is what they say.
Ferrell: I’m about to cry right now.
Heder: I always love messing with my own hair. As much as I can, I don’t normally like to wear wigs. If it’s just scheduling reasons, but yeah, we did extensions and played around. It’s always fun getting into that character that way.
Ferrell: Plus, really very few of us have a job where you can get paid to come up with a crazy hairstyle. So it’s always fun if you can add that extra dimension of your look and hair is a huge part of that.
CS: Jon and Jenna’s kiss?
Heder: Well, in the script, it was like a sweet innocent kiss, I think from what I remember. But we were just talking about the characters and how they both have neither ever had experience with the opposite sex, for good reasons. So when they get together, we just thought neither of them would know what they’re doing and we should just make it like the most awkward kiss ever, where she’s a little bit more excited, she gets into it a little bit more. Jimmy is still trying to go by what he watches on like Backstreet Boys videos. Like simple, beautiful and yeah, we didn’t really rehearse it. But when we shot it, it was like all right, let’s just kind of go for it and see what happens. It was really weird. There was a couple where she was like making moans like “Ahh ahh.”
CS: What is it like performing in the stadium with crowds, and how much did you really do?
Heder: Well, the first part, I was kind of nervous. I’m used to it now, started getting used to like, being in front of the camera is fine. In front of other people, there’s always a small cast. I remember the first time when we started shooting the skating stuff, to be out there where we have our routines planned, we know the routine but then you have all these extras. And it was like the real deal. I got up, I was nervous, I was like…
Ferrell: You don’t want to mess up.
Heder: I didn’t want to mess up and was like once you start going it’s fine.
Ferrell: We worked with this woman, Sarah Kawahara and she’s like the big time skating choreographer, to the point where some of the other coaches who were former pros, actually you could see them get nervous around her. She does all the Disney on Ice, everything. You have these coaches [and] in your mind, you’d be like, “I nailed that” and they were like, “better.”
Heder: It was like real time coaches.
Ferrell: “You’re gonna get there. Yeah.”
Heder: They were like real coaches. The directors say, “Oh, great job. Now do it this way.” And they were like, “Yeah, okay.”
Ferrell: “Make sure you point your toe.” And the director would be like, “Looks fine.” They were almost like, “Don’t tell them that.” But it was intense.
Heder: And I tried to do as much skating as I could. Obviously, we had doubles to do the really cool spins and the jumps.
CS: Any wires?
Heder: We got on some wires, yeah, we got on some wires. For any of the flying sequences. There was a few.
Ferrell: I flew at the end.
Heder: That was wirework.
Ferrell: But that actually was insane. We were like 100 feet up in the air above all these people going [forget the gesture]. I was like, “I hope these don’t break.”
CS: What was it like seeing the Korean film?
Ferrell: We never got to see it. It wasn’t mocked up so we just had to react to what we thought it would look like.
Heder: Or the director going, “Now the head falls off.”
Ferrell: So we both thought it was super funny when we got to see it. It was very crudely done, you know. But then the head comes off.
Heder: And when we shot the scene where his character’s practicing off a mannequin and his double actually nailed the head. There was one time where he nailed it perfectly because they had it rigged so it would fall, but he hit it instead like right off.
CS: What’s coming up?
Ferrell: I just started filming another sports comedy about the ABA which was this league in the ’70s, a competing league with the NBA. So it’s a basketball comedy. “Semi Pro.”
CS: Your character?
Ferrell: I’m this guy Jackie Moon. I’m the player/owner/coach of the Flint Michigan Tropics. And I was able to buy the team with the money from my single, my number one hit song “Love Me Sexy.” The true story part of it is the NBA and the ABA merge and they only took four teams. So we’re trying to play for fourth place to make it to the NBA.
CS: And what about the Mr. Tartanian/Angry Boss sketch with Pierce Brosnan?
Ferrell: Oh, it was the interview at the travel magazine. Just Adam and I wrote it. We were talking about, we would sometimes just kick scenarios and write so we thought about just a job interview scene at a travel magazine and I end up stabbing Chris Parnell with a trident 100 times.
Blades of Glory hits theaters on Friday, March 30.
