Nearly a decade after the original film was released, Will Ferrell and much of the cast and crew from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, have reunited to make a sequel: Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.
Paul Rudd and Steve Carell – who played Ferrell’s sidekicks Paul Fantana and Brick Tamland, respectively, in the original and are returning for the sequel – recently held a teleconference with college students from across the US to talk about the upcoming release.
“We all just wanted to do it for the sake of doing it, and I think we all would have done it in a vacuum. Even if there was no film and any camera, we would have come back and done it, because it’s so much fun,” said Carell.
Rudd had similar feelings.
“It was such a blast doing the first one that I would jump at the chance to come back and beat a dead horse,” said Rudd.
According to Carell, a lot of celebrities expressed interest in making cameo appearances in Anchorman 2, although he was reluctant to reveal who.
“People were calling to get into the movie,” Carell said. “I think it was the same on the first one. You know, all those cameos that we had and the big fight scene in the first one, people just wanted to be a part of the silliness. So I think the same holds true for this one.”
According to Rudd and Carell, the idea of doing a sequel to Anchorman has been around for years, and the project had originally been planned as a Broadway musical, which Carell said he had been exited about.
“The fact that at any given moment, the characters could just break into song. The idea of that happening was just great,” Carell said. “I also liked the idea that there were, at that point in time, enough people had been clamoring for an Anchorman sequel and the idea of doing it as a musical on Broadway just really, I thought, was funny and annoyed people.”
Carell went on to talk about the quality of Anchorman 2’s script as well as that of the talent involved with the production.
“There were just so many fertile minds working. We ended up with way more material than we needed,” Carell said. “The script was in great shape, so we had that as a starting point. But on any given day, we would come up with as much material as was on the page. I mean, there were scenes that were supposed to be about a minute and a half that ended up being 10-minutes.”
Anchorman 2 will be released to theaters on Dec. 20.
