Will Ferrell Drafted Ron Burgundy as QB and Bombed His SNL Debut. He's Fine With Both.

Will Ferrell showed up to the Staples Center in a stolen security guard uniform, spotted Shaq sitting courtside entirely by accident, and then got invited to physically eject him from the building. That is not a bit. That is just a Tuesday for Will Ferrell, a man who has spent thirty years treating the world as a place where very strange things are allowed to happen if you commit hard enough to the premise.

That instinct runs through everything he told Travis and Jason Kelsey on this week’s New Heights. He sat down to talk about his new comedy with Reese Witherspoon, his SNL years, and his athletic backstory, and managed to be genuinely funny in the format that eats most guests alive: the cheerful podcast chat. He wasn’t doing press. He was just being Will Ferrell, which turns out to be plenty.

Lorne Giveth Nothing

The SNL section is where the episode earns its keep. Ferrell describes his 1995 audition in a completely empty studio, rolling around the floor doing a cat toy bit for a camera operator and a sound guy while Lorne Michaels deliberately drained the room of all energy to simulate the pressure of live television. ‘I’m in a void rolling around going oh my God I’m going back to LA,’ he says. He got the job anyway, spent seven years there, hosted five more times, and still couldn’t get Michaels to hand him a straight compliment. After his last hosting stint, exhausted, he leaned over at the after-party and told Lorne he couldn’t believe he used to do this every week. He was hoping for the attaboy. He did not get the attaboy.

I thought he was going to give me the you know attab boy like like you know you were no you were great you were wonderful he was like no it’s a young man’s game.

Ferrell clearly loves Michaels. He also clearly finds him hilarious in the way you find a force of nature hilarious, at a safe distance. The bit about getting cast advice from Kevin Nealon during his first season is just as good: Nealon told him not to try to score every week, that ten funny things in a season is a Hall of Fame year, like hitting .300 in baseball. It took the pressure off. It’s better advice than anything in the relationship advice voicemails they did later, including Ron Burgundy’s.

Ricky Bobby and the Checkered Flag Theory of Dating

The Kelsey brothers had the foresight to ask Ferrell to answer fan voicemails in character, and the results are what happens when the right format finds the right guest. A listener asked about red flags versus green flags on a first date. Ferrell, as Ricky Bobby, declined the premise entirely.

I don’t know anything about red flag or green flag uh you just gotta you just got to get yourself into position to look for the checkered flag.

The second voicemail, about whether to take your ex-girlfriend’s best friend to the concert you bought tickets for before getting dumped, prompted Ron Burgundy to advise the guy to take photos making out with the best friend and send them to the ex. ‘You send a signal to that young lady that you’re not messing around,’ Ferrell said, in full Burgundy, calling out Kajagoogoo and Duran Duran as possible concert options. It was the kind of thing that only works because he goes all the way. One foot in, one foot out is death, he told Jason earlier. He practices what he preaches.

Anchorman Got Rejected Twenty Times

The best piece of actual industry information in the episode is almost buried in the lightning round. Ferrell mentions that Anchorman got passed on by roughly twenty studios before it got made, because nobody could get their head around an ensemble comedy set in a newsroom. Everyone heard ‘news’ and checked out. So Ferrell and Adam McKay pivoted, applied the same logic to NASCAR instead, and sold Talladega Nights in what sounds like about forty-five seconds. The idea that could get made wasn’t necessarily the better idea, just the more legible one. That’s not cynicism, that’s how the whole thing works, and Ferrell delivers the information with the calm of someone who has made peace with it.

I remember thinking gosh this is so hard to get off the ground we should maybe pick a topic that everyone’s talking about and at that time NASCAR was at its height and I like for instance oh gosh what what if I’m just me as a NASCAR driver and yeah and we pitch we sold that in like two seconds.

He also improvised ‘milk was a bad choice’ because the director handed him an actual carton of warm milk to drink on a 98-degree day in Los Angeles and he was just telling the truth. He doesn’t remember 20 percent of when people quote his movies back to him, which means he’s out there regularly failing to complete the line from Step Brothers and walking away from furious strangers. The man is having a great time.