Behind the scenes of Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell’s chaotic ‘Spirited’ tap dance
“I don’t have one in my mind,” Ryan Reynolds says of the idea of collaborating with Will Ferrell. “Every time I’ve talked to him about it, he’s been like, ‘I don’t know anything about it yet. I’m not really sure what would be the right direction for us.’”
The two actors have a solid working relationship — Ryan Reynolds has long since made a career as a stand-up comic (he’s been called the best improvisational actor in Hollywood), “and he does comedy in a way that was very, very exciting to me because it was like, OK, I’m not a stand-up comic. I’m not the kind of comedian that just puts a joke together.” Reynolds got in touch with Will once his new movie ‘The Proposal’ was about to start shooting. “At one point, Will and I were running through a sequence and he was like, ‘I love this! I’ve never seen it on film.’ I was like, ‘No, man, this is a scene where we’re doing a tap dance sequence for the whole movie, and my character is in the lead.’”
“We were just like, ‘Can we come in? Can we try it?’ And he’s like, ‘You know, this is a really fun scene. Let’s just do it.’”
‘A lot of stuff got thrown out because we ended up having sex in it,” Will Ferrell says.
As it turned out, Will Ferrell was only kidding. When the two actors were talking about collaborating in the late stages of production on ‘Spirited’, Will Ferrell was serious. He got his wish in the end — he ended up in the lead role after all. “We were like, ‘Can we come in? Can we try it?’ And he’s like, ‘You know, this is a really fun scene. Let’s just do it.’ And it turned out, we had to cut out a lot of the, like, drunkenness — a lot