Will Ferrell Runs a Hamster Wheel 50 Feet in the Air and Still Had to Sing

Will Ferrell introduces his children to guests as a room full of sitcom writers, trained to laugh on cue at everything he says. They’ve started claiming authorship of his jokes. Quarantine, for Will Ferrell, was apparently going great.

This is a pandemic-era Zoom interview filmed at the Largo Theater in Los Angeles, where Conan is waiting on a delivery of Omaha steaks, and Ferrell is broadcasting from what he cheerfully describes as a construction site trailer with bad wood paneling. No audience, no energy direction, no stakes except the steaks. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely works, because these two have been doing this long enough that they’ve stopped needing the scaffolding of a normal interview. They just talk, they riff, they mildly insult each other, and somehow a conversation about a Netflix musical comedy becomes one of the more honest portraits of what it’s actually like to be Will Ferrell.

The Hamster Wheel Problem

The movie in question is Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Ferrell’s love letter to the competition he first encountered at his wife’s family’s house in Sweden, where he sat for three hours, totally mesmerized and completely lost. His description of Eurovision is perfect and accurate: “cirque du soleil meets american idol meets a residency show in vegas” plus “the olympics because it’s different countries going up against each other.” He’s been to three of them live. One featured a man running in a human-sized hamster wheel behind a singing act for the entire duration of the song. The performer never acknowledged him. The camera got tight shots. He just kept running.

the singer didn’t look back the the they even got a tight shot of the guy running in the hamster wheel he just kept running he wouldn’t even look at the camera

They put it in the movie. Ferrell plays the hamster wheel guy. He is hoisted 50 feet above the ground inside it, controlling his own movement by his gate, and singing the full lyrics of the song at the same time. The prop master felt the need to repeatedly mention there were 96 weld joints on the piece of steel. Ferrell says he gave thanks. The prop master wanted more. This is a genuinely relatable workplace dynamic.

i found myself on numerous occasions over my career when i read something on the page i forget that i’m actually going to have to do it

Pierce Brosnan Is a Perfect Human and That’s Honestly Annoying

The other physical detail that lands hard is the Pierce Brosnan section. Ferrell calls casting him as his father in the film “a total dick move” and “a casting choice that literally makes no sense,” which is both self-deprecating and correct. But the real story is shooting on a fishing boat in five-to-six-foot swells while crew members are visibly sick over the side. Brosnan, in a fisherman’s outfit that somehow looks dashing, is not seasick. He’s between takes taking selfies in aviator sunglasses. When they finally dock, his verdict on the day is: “that was a day.” Ferrell’s reading of that line as a positive statement is delivered with the exhausted admiration of a man who knows he was just out-classed on a boat.

he is like one of those people who’s kind of a you know like a perfect human being like an o you know the ultimate dinner party guests uh so gracious and kind and humorous stories

There’s also a brief, entirely earnest discussion of Ferrell wearing message t-shirts in front of paparazzi to get out public health messaging during the pandemic, which sits next to Conan admitting his own shirts said things like “if I’m going to die at least let me be drunk” and “hey man masks aren’t my thing.” He claims these were pre-existing shirts. The bit writes itself and they mostly let it.

Conan floats the idea of a Will Ferrell spoken word album. Not sung. Spoken. Thirty to fifty songs. Ferrell estimates the runtime would get you to Framingham, Massachusetts if you drove straight from Los Angeles. Conan, to his credit, tells him not to do it, which apparently confirms to Ferrell that he should absolutely do it. The salute he gives at the end of this exchange is the most committed anyone has looked in a pandemic Zoom interview.