The New Office Guy

By Joel Stein/Los Angeles

The trick to creating a good comic persona is to find a new way to be unaware. Steve Carell has landed on just such a type: a confident, articulate buffoon who has no idea he's messing things up--Ted Knight without the bubbling insecurity, Will Ferrell without the boyish need to please. With his serious, Father Knows Best demeanor, Carell maintains self-assurance in the face of obvious failure; he's a pompous but lovable loser. "I myself am a lovable loser. So it's an easy transition," Carell says while sitting in the trailer for his upcoming movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. "I'm more loser than lovable, but I bring lovable to the screen. That's where all the craft and years of school and Uta Hagen come in."

Five years ago, Carell, 41, was getting fewer chances to do lovable than just loser. But after he became a correspondent on The Daily Show, the work poured in. First he was a supporting player in Julia Louis-Dreyfus' short-lived sitcom Watching Ellie, then he was upstaging Jim Carrey as the guy who spoke in tongues in Bruce Almighty and Ferrell as the weatherman in Anchorman. On March 24, he will play the lead in NBC's remake of the beloved BBC sitcom The Office. There's also a Woody Allen movie, a Nicole Kidman movie and Virgin, which he co-wrote. And he has been cast as the lead in a film version of Get Smart, despite the fact that the spy-spoof remake doesn't have a director, a script or even a concept. "Plus, I might have been in Racing Stripes," he says. "I don't even know."

That's a lot of work for a guy whose specialty is acting stupid. "A lot of people play dumb people," says The Office's executive producer Greg Daniels. "But Steve has a way of playing intelligent, articulate people who make foolish choices. People who on the face of it seem smart but once you look deeper have no clue. Which is cool for comedy that's more subtle." Carell is helped along by a Midwestern retro-adult face, made not so much for comedy as it is for telling people to get back to work. He's clever enough to use that look to his advantage, to maintain the grownup posture in ridiculous situations; he's the anti--Jim Carrey.

"There's no pessimism in anything Carell does. He should know by now that things are not going to go well, but he thinks they will. That's Laurel and Hardy," says Ricky Gervais, who co-created and starred in the original Office. "I like people who keep failing and say, 'That's another day.' That's what's funny, when it's not sad."

In order to avoid copying Gervais' character, Carell has not watched the BBC show. "I don't even get to see The Daily Show anymore. I'm in bed by 10. I hear it's still very good," says Carell, who has two young children with his wife, fellow Daily Show and Second City alumnus Nancy Walls. "In the year and a half since I left, it's gone through the roof and won all kinds of accolades. I guess they needed to get rid of some dead weight." But while other Daily Show correspondents have been able to create amusing iterations of the soulless newscaster, Carell has been able to distill that character down to its most elemental trait--the faked confidence we all use to get by. It may be the perfect comedic take on America in the 21st century.