Most of the time Will Ferrell seems happy making big budget, loud-mouth comedies, many of which are great fun, but every so often he decides to throw us a curveball. We’ve had Will Ferrell does Woody Allen in Melinda & Melinda, he got all existential in Stranger than Fiction and then headed off to do a one-man Broadway show in which he played George W. Bush, even though he’d never been in a proper play before.
Now it seems he’s doing something a little bit different again. Ferrell has signed on to appear in Everything Must Go, written and directed by commercials helmer, Dan Rush, and based on a short story by Raymond Carver. Variety reports that Ferrell will play a guy who loses his job and gets locked out of the house by his wife. She deposits his belongings on the front lawn, and he spends the next four days trying to sell his possessions.
Although the film is said to be humourous, it’s certainly not the broad comedy Ferrell is famous for, and the makers promise that it’s as much about sympathising with the man’s ordeal as having a laughing. The entire film will cost less than $10 million, about half what Ferrell normally earns per picture, so he must be keen.
Ferell is currently shooting The Other Guys, alongside Mark Wahlberg, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, so presumably he’ll make Everything Must Go sometime after that’s wrapped.