Will Ferrell: Hollywood's highest paid star

Will Ferrell died last year, albeit briefly. On 13 March 2006, a bulletin appeared on the I-Newswire service indicating that America's most bankable comedy actor had been killed "in a freak paragliding accident".

Within 12 hours - before Ferrell had a chance to hear about his untimely demise - the story was exposed as a hoax. But Hollywood's financiers must have poured themselves an extra Scotch that night because - as the wild success of his latest movie, Blades of Glory, shows - Ferrell is the closest thing Hollywood has to a banker - a man who earns his $20m fee on the opening weekend of any movie he deigns to star in.

How does he do it? How did Ferrell become a star? You would not look twice if you passed him in the street. He is tall - too tall, you might think, for Hollywood. He's too bland - his Play-Doh face, in its default puzzled-friendly setting, is punchable. Too unsculptured, too - his potato-sack body could belong to a third-division lock forward. He is, in short, normal - and, normally, we expect more of our stars.

But normal worked for Tom Hanks. Normal worked for James Stewart. And normal is working a treat for Will Ferrell. Indeed, when his latest film - a high-camp romp charting the fortunes of an all-male ice-skating duo at the Olympics - opened in the US last weekend, it took $33m, taking it straight to No 1 at the box office. The American critics, though, did not go crazy.

When Blades of Glory opens in Britain on Friday, one should expect a similarly lukewarm response from the media. One should also expect pots of cash at the multiplexes, because this is a movie containing all the Ferrell staples - a retro sporting theme; a little tongue-in-cheek genre bending; some male nudity - that have turned this friendly giant into a hit machine.

There is, Ferrell might remind us, more cerebral work in his back catalogue - Melinda and Melinda and Stranger than Fiction - but when one thinks of Ferrell, one does not think of him tinkering at the edges of a Woody Allen film. One thinks of him in his latest incarnation: packing 6ft 3in of all-American idiot into 5ft 6in of luminous unitard.

"It's obviously a funny premise," says Ferrell, who is currently filming Semi-Pro, a 1970s basketball picture and the third in the " sports trilogy" that started with Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. "Two guys become the first men's figure-skating team. And as soon as you told it to anyone, they started laughing. I kept thinking: why hasn't anyone made this movie before? Figure skating is so ripe for it. I mean, between the costumes and the petulant athletes with hairstyles and make-up, there's a lot."

Ferrell, as he shows in Old School, Elf and Talladega Nights, certainly has an eye for a ludicrous situation. But he is, he maintains, a "regular guy" whose comic touch is somewhat at odds with a "low key" persona.

"I do always have the feeling that I'm letting people down," he says. "When they meet me, people think, 'He didn't seem that funny. He seems like a normal guy. Oh well.' People ask me to wait while they go and find a pen to get my autograph with. Or they don't believe it's me."

His everyman quality, though, is at the heart of his appeal. Indeed, Ferrell never wanted to be a film star. He was born in 1967. His childhood in Newport Beach, California, where he was brought up by his mother, Kay, and his father, Lee - sometime keyboardist for The Righteous Brothers - was straightforward. He was a good high-school gridiron player and a practical joker who enjoyed sending up his teachers on the public address system.

"I've got no dark secrets," he says. "I wasn't beaten up, my parents were kind to me, there was a low crime rate where we lived. Maybe that's where the comedy comes from - as some sort of reaction to the safe, boring life in the suburbs. Although, I gotta say, I never had any resentment of the suburbs.

"I do have a lot of friends in comedy who say, 'What's wrong with you? You're not nearly messed up enough.' Which is true. I don't really have too many deep-seated dark places I go to. I definitely have a dark sense of humour and love thinking about twisted scenarios. [At school] I was kind of the conscientious class clown. I'd pick and choose my spots but not to the point of annoyance. I'd win the teacher over, and then know when it was appropriate to stop."

Ferrell enrolled in the University of Southern California's sports broadcasting programme, where he was - as a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity - something of a keg-party jock (an experience that he would draw on for his 2003 varsity comedy, Old School). But Ferrell had a change of heart, decided to be a comedian and joined the touring Los Angeles improvisational group The Groundlings.

"[Being a journalist] seemed a little more legitimate than trying to be a comedian or actor," Ferrell says. "But once I graduated from college, I started working for a local cable news show, and I found I liked making fun of the broadcasters rather than actually doing it."

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy - Ferrell's 2004 mock-biopic of an old-school television sports anchor - was evidently fostered in this period, but at the time, the young actor was more concerned with finding enough work. His break came in 1995, when he was picked over Steve Carell - now the star of The Office: An American Workplace and The 40-Year-Old Virgin - to appear on the ribald entertainment show Saturday Night Live.

On television, Ferrell was a hit. He became Saturday Night Live's impressionist-in-chief, performing acute skits as George W Bush, Neil Diamond or Ted Kennedy. It is a measure of how loved he was on SNL that he not only became the only actor from the show ever to be nominated for an Emmy, he also became its most prized asset. In 2001, the producers of SNL were so keen to keep Ferrell that they gave him a salary of $350,000 - the most paid to a performer.

But Ferrell knew he was worth more and set out to be a movie star. Of course, he had appeared in films before. The guy who shouts: "Ernie you're the man!" during the final bowling scene of Kingpin - that's Ferrell. The "living statue" of a soldier Lindsay Lohan passes in a climactic scene in The Parent Trap - that's Ferrell. The blacked-up Arab who taunts Mike Myers in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery - you guessed it.

Perhaps Ferrell thought such roles were not a proper showcase for his talents. In 2003, his opportunity to break into the A-list came when he was cast as the outsized eponymous hero of Elf. That film was proof, if nothing else, that a big, ordinary-looking bloke in a stupid costume could be very funny indeed.

Old School - in which Ferrell played a superannuated beer-drinking college boy called Frank the Tank - followed. With it came great trumpeting from the press that Hollywood was in the grip of a new "Frat Pack" of actors, including Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Owen and Luke Wilson, Jon Favreau and, of course, Ferrell. The Frat Pack, so the wisdom goes, make movies together and party together. But Ferrell has never seen it like that.

"It really doesn't exist, this Frat Pack," Ferrell said last year. "We run into each other on occasions and we all like each other's films, I guess, but there isn't some funny bar where we all hang out. At least, if there is, they haven't invited me. I wasn't in You, Me and Dupree, and none of them was in Talladega Nights with me and actually, nobody gives a shit."

Still, Ferrell has made several films with a familiar-looking bunch of men with a similar outlook. And he can thank Woody Allen that they have not been his only movies. After Robert Downey Jnr pulled out of Melinda and Melinda - Allen's bifocal vision of a woman trying to pull her life back together - Ferrell received a call from the auteur.

"He said he was a fan of Old School," says Ferrell, with some scepticism. The film was a critical if not a commercial hit, and Ferrell showed he could deliver nuance in drama. It would, however, be his last serious role until Stranger Than Fiction (2006), where he plays a character in a novel whose every action is determined by the hand an author, played by Emma Thompson.

So would he like to do more drama? "I'd love to do more films like that, but I'm not really getting deluged by scripts in the Stranger Than Fiction category. I don't know why. I did get good reviews but it's not like that has changed the landscape of anything. And I'd be doing these next couple of comedy films regardless of how Stranger Than Fiction did commercially or critically."

Anyway, Ferrell says, why should the plaudits go to drama? He is, Hollywood lore has it, the highest-paid actor never to have received an Oscar nomination - a fact he puts down to the Academy's patronising attitude towards films that make you laugh.

"I bet you eventually the Oscars will have a comedy category just like the Golden Globes," he says. "I think it's a bit of a cop-out, though. I think they really should just open up and consider comedic performances. I don't know why there have to be separate categories. I do think you can look at comedic performances and think about a dramatic actor doing that same thing, and realise they wouldn't be able to do it."

Sour grapes? Perhaps. Ferrell has the grace to laugh about the situation, and, at this year's Oscar ceremony, he performed a song with Jack Black about the perpetual snubbing of comedy films.

Ferrell seems to be a student of the art of comedy. He admits he was " blown away" by Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan - a film driven by his Talladega Nights co-star Sacha Baron Cohen.

"Did it change the face of comedy?" Ferrell asks. "I think a lot of us were slightly depressed after seeing it, saying, 'My God, this thing is brilliant and yet can there be a deluge of character comedies that will mix with the general public? Is that going to be the next thing?' I'm sure there will, and they will all be compared to Borat. I know Sacha is doing Bruno next and I think he definitely can do it again."

The reason Borat scares Ferrell is that it is the antithesis of his own comedic approach. With Baron Cohen's characters - Borat and Bruno and Ali G - the comedy lies in the clown's relationship with the people he encounters. The joke is on the general public, and we love Baron Cohen for exposing their stupidity. Ferrell, meanwhile, is the general public's representative, and the joke is always, always on him. He takes the slings and arrows so we don't have to.

Ferrell has a distinctly unstarry marriage with a Swede, Viveca Paulin, whom he met in an acting class in 1995. They run marathons together. They have two children, Magnus and Matthias. On weekends, Ferrell plays soccer with other parents. Despite the huge paychecks, Ferrell's life is not one of excess.

So, where do these strange, lycra-clad characters come from? Ferrell seems, at least, like a serious person. "I'm not a good enough actor to play real tragedy, so I bring a comic element to most things as my answer to the world's problems," he says. "I'm not a clown. I just love goofing around. But I don't feel the need to act the clown in private. Although, I confess that I do sometimes put together outfits to annoy my wife."

His wife had better put up with the annoying outfits for the moment. Her husband is making far too much money with them to stop now.

Where there's a Will: how Ferrell hit the big time

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) / The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)

Ferrell joins fellow Saturday Night Liver Mike Myers for two Austin Powers movies before his character, the hapless henchman Mustafa, is very, very badly burned by his boss Dr Evil.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

Ferrell, as the wildlife field marshal Marshall Willenholly, pursues the eponymous Jay and Silent Bob to Hollywood to recover a stolen orang-utan, "the most dangerous animal known to man".

Zoolander (2001)

As Jacobin Mugatu, a megalomaniacal fashion mogul, Ferrell concocts a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister of Malaysia to prevent him abolishing cheap child labour in the Far East.

Old School (2003)

Frank (Ferrell) is trying to put his hellraising days as "Frank the Tank " behind him by settling down with his new wife. His friend Mitch has other ideas, and forms a frat-house where they can relive their college days. Cue much drinking, streaking and mud wrestling.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Ferrell takes the title role in this spoof on the macho world of Seventies television news. Ron Burgundy is a pompous news anchor threatened by the arrival of a female reporter who is determined to become the station's first anchorwoman. The film is crowded with cameos from Ferrell's fellow Frat Pack members Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller and the Wilson brothers.

Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Ferrell's first "serious" movie role was in the comic half of Woody Allen's examination of comedy and tragedy; he played Hobie, an actor whose career has stalled.

Bewitched (2005)

Ferrell and Nicole Kidman shared a Razzie award for worst screen couple in this ill-fated remake of the TV comedy.

Wedding Crashers (2005)

Ferrell (uncredited) appears as Chazz Reinhold, the original wedding crasher, who still lives with his mom and has turned to funeral crashing. But he still throws in a wedding now and then.

The Producers (2005)

Ferrell steals the show as escaped Nazi Franz Liebkin, creator of the hit musical Springtime for Hitler.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

Ricky Bobby (Ferrell) is a racetrack icon - until the French Formula One star Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen) arrives on the scene.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

Harold Crick (Ferrell), a colourless IRS agent, starts to hear a voice narrating his life story. It's Emma Thompson's struggling author who, in a bid to spice up her novel, in which Crick is the protagonist, has decided to kill him off.

Blades of Glory (2007)

Ferrell and fellow figure skater Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite) are stripped of their medals and disqualified from singles competition. They find a loophole in the rules that allows them to compete as a pair. Comedy ensues.

Tim Walker

Blades of Glory is out on Friday Additional reporting by Lesley O'Toole