Two years after their split, director Adam McKay has opened up about the feud between he and former filmmaking partner Will Ferrell. While speaking with Vanity Fair about his new Netflix project Don’t Look Up, McKay got candid about tensions between the two, explaining how everything began and where it’s at now. The duo are still not on speaking terms, McKay says, thanks to a casting mishap on the upcoming series about Jerry Buss.
The misunderstanding began while McKay was working on the HBO limited series following the same events from the book Showtime about the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers team. McKay had cast Ferrell as Buss, the legendary ’80s-era team owner, but preferred Ferrell’s real life best friend John C. Reilly.
“The truth is, the way the show was always going to be done, it’s hyperrealistic,” he said. “And Ferrell just doesn’t look like Jerry Buss, and he’s not that vibe of a Jerry Buss. And there were some people involved who were like, ‘We love Ferrell, he’s a genius, but we can’t see him doing it.’ It was a bit of a hard discussion.”
But McKay, who worked with Ferrell on projects like Anchorman and Step-Brothers, hesitated to make the switch: “Didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” he explained. “Wanted to be respectful.”
Nevertheless, he recast Reilly in the role, which infuriated Ferrell. What drove an even bigger wedge between the two was that McKay wasn’t the first to call Ferrell with the news — Reilly was.
“I should have called him and I didn’t,” said McKay. “And Reilly did, of course, because Reilly, he’s a stand-up guy.”
So, in 2019, the duo released a joint statement announcing their split. While the statement seemed cordial, stating that they’d always remain friends, McKay has now shed light on the fact that they aren’t at all on good terms.
“I said, ‘Well, I mean, we’re splitting up the company,’” McKay recalled. “And he basically was like, ‘Yeah, we are,’ and basically was like, ‘Have a good life.’ And I’m like, ‘Fuck, Ferrell’s never going to talk to me again.’ So it ended not well.”
To this day, McKay says he regrets how he handled the recasting decision: “I fucked up on how I handled that,” McKay lamented. “It’s the old thing of keep your side of the street clean. I should have just done everything by the book.”
McKay continues: “In my head, I was like, ‘We’ll let all this blow over. Six months to a year, we’ll sit down, we’ll laugh about it and go, It’s all business junk, who gives a shit? We worked together for 25 years. Are we really going to let this go away?’”
He finished by saying that Ferrell “took it as a way deeper hurt than I ever imagined and I tried to reach out to him, and I reminded him of some slights that were thrown my way that were never apologized for.”
