The Tragedy Of Will Ferrell Explained

Only a handful of people could ever stake a claim as the standard bearer of comedy for a particular era, and Will Ferrell is one of those people. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he dominated "Saturday Night Live" with his over-the-top characters and ridiculous celebrity impressions, particularly those of Robert Goulet and President George W. Bush. And from the mid-2000s onward, Ferrell became one of the most bankable actors in Hollywood, starring in imaginative, hilarious, and quotable big-screen comedies, such as "Old School," "Elf," "Talladega Nights," "Anchorman," "Barbie," "The Lego Movie," and "Step Brothers." If there's one through-line in his work, apart from generating funny unscripted movie moments, it's that Ferrell will do almost anything to get a visceral reaction out of audiences — in other words, he's always after huge laughs.

He's not generally associated with anything traumatic, dramatic, or anything that would fall under the purview of the sad side of life, but Ferrell is a human being after all. Like everyone who isn't a whirlwind of comic energy whose professional purpose isn't to make people laugh, he's experienced the occasional hiccup, heartbreak, and near-miss with doom. Here's a dive into the little-known but very sad and tragic parts of the life of Will Ferrell.

For many years, most any big comedy project that Will Ferrell took on, he did with Adam McKay. After working in tandem at "Saturday Night Live," they started writing screenplays for Ferrell to star in and for McKay to sometimes direct, such as "Step Brothers" and "The Other Guys." They also created Funny or Die and Gary Sanchez Productions, but by 2019 it was all over, with McKay departing Funny or Die and the production company shuttering when the pair opted to professionally split. The breakup appeared amicable, the result of two strong creative minds who wanted to do different things — silly comedies for Ferrell, and sharp satire like "The Big Short" for McKay. "We just have different amounts of bandwidth," Ferrell told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021.

Later that year, McKay came clean with Vanity Fair (via The Independent), admitting that his relationship with Ferrell had already grown gradually more and more tense, which the filmmaker blew up completely when he overlooked Ferrell for a role he desired. McKay led the production on the HBO series "Winning Time," depicting the tragic real-life history of the Los Angeles Lakers, and Ferrell really wanted to portray '80s-era owner Jerry Buss. Instead, McKay went ahead and cast John C. Reilly — a close friend of Ferrell's, and a frequent co-star in the movies he'd made with McKay — because he looked a lot like the real Buss. "I should have called him and I didn't," McKay said.

In the latter half of the 1990s, the series of nearly dialogue-free "Saturday Night Live" sketches in which Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan portrayed two cheesy and predatory nightclub sleazes, soundtracked to Haddaway's "What is Love," were so popular that they were adapted into a film. "SNL" producer Lorne Michaels also produced that spinoff movie, 1998's "A Night at the Roxbury," and he had one person in mind: Amy Heckerling, fresh off of the hit comedy "Clueless." She tentatively signed on for the job, while also showing romantic interest in Kattan, according to the actor's memoir. He says he turned her down, and after she reportedly threatened to leave the production, Michaels asked Kattan to just let the relationship with Heckerling happen in order to save the movie. In the end, Kattan briefly coupled with Heckerling, who didn't direct "A Night at the Roxbury," but produced it.

Watching all of this unfold: Will Ferrell, who didn't like what he saw. "I had tried to hide my relationship with Amy, not realizing how obvious it had been to everyone else, including Will," Kattan wrote in "Baby, Don't Hurt Me." After fulfilling his contractual obligations to make the movie, Ferrell blatantly and directly stopped being friends with Kattan. "So I got all your messages, but I didn't call you back because I didn't want to talk to you," Kattan recalled Ferrell telling him.

There are more fatal accidents on movie sets than one might think, and Will Ferrell nearly met his end in one such incident. The script for the 2013 sequel "Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues" called for Ferrell's character, the bombastic, self-absorbed, and disgraced newsman Ron Burgundy, to place a noose around his neck. In what director Adam McKay called a "really scary" moment, the safety apparatus failed. "For half a second, the rig didn't operate properly and there was actual tension on the rope," he recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. "But then it gave way and Will was OK." Filming resumed, but the lingering fear and unease were such that after two days, McKay halted production for a cast and crew meeting.

There was another frightening moment on the set of the original 2004 "Anchorman" film, when a trained animal didn't follow directions in a scene that featured Ferrell. "The bear did a hint of a bluff charge for a second," McKay said. "From that moment on, I said, 'I will never put a live animal in a shot with an actor ever again."

On the evening of April 12, 2018, Will Ferrell was involved in a brutal car accident that sent multiple people in his orbit to a hospital. Ferrel had appeared at a voter registration drive in San Diego, and was returning home to the Los Angeles area in a Lincoln Navigator SUV. The four-person party was traveling on a section of northbound Interstate 5 outside of Los Angeles when the vehicle was hit on the side and the rear all at once by another car. That caused the driver of Ferrell's car to veer suddenly off course, whereupon it struck the freeway's center divide and then violently overturned.

The driver of the second car, whom police initially suspected to have fallen asleep while driving, wasn't seriously hurt. Ferrell's long-time chauffeur, Mark Thompson, and passenger Carolina Barlow were so significantly hurt that they were treated by first responders before requiring hospitalization. Neither the other passenger nor Ferrell were seriously injured.