PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: You’ve often said you’re a comic who doesn’t have a dark side. But Adam McKay has said you secretly do. Does that manifest itself in how you seem to like to mess with people?
WILL FERRELL: I don’t have a dark side in the sense that I’m pained or I put my fist in a mirror or something like that. But I have a devious side, for sure. I’ve always loved watching Andy Kaufman. I love it when you can do something that makes 75 percent of the audience laugh and 25 percent, it drives them crazy. That’s a good little ratio. MORE
RELATED: Casa de mi Padre aspires to be an awful telenovela—two terms that might not be mutually exclusive—but is there anything else for us to see here? After the initial goof of Ferrell speaking another language and subscribing to moldering cliches, there’s just nothing to laugh at. The movie is deliberately bad on purpose, without anything to show for all its considerable efforts at looking hackneyed as possible. Yeah, I get that the wobbly camera movements and puppet animals are supposed to look wretched. But I also get that making a bad movie on purpose is still a bad movie. There aren’t really any jokes in Casa de mi Padre , but I guess you can maybe respect it as a weird, audience-punishing prank? Thanks guys, but no mas. MORE