John C. Reilly on Terri, Confounding Expectations, and Step Brothers 2

You've been cast as a mentor a couple of times in 2011: Mr. Fitzgerald, Deansie from Cedar Rapids. What is about you that makes casting directors go, "We need a mentor; call Reilly!"

If Deansie is your mentor, you're gonna end up in AA. [Laughs] I don't know. Why people pick me for the roles that they do is a bit of a mystery. To a certain extent, you know yourself, and to a certain extent, all of us don't really have a truly objective view of what we really look like to other people. We're living one reality inside here, and what people see or feel or experience in our presence is often something different. I'm just glad I'm working.

You work a lot. And in recent years you've bounced around a lot, too. One minute you're in Chicago, the next Talladega Nights, and then something like Terri.

Yeah, it's like Whac-A-Mole.

It is exactly like Whac-A-Mole. Do you intentionally try to change it up on a regular basis?

You have to. If there is anything deliberate about what I do, it's that. I don't deliberately go into comedy or go into indies, but I do deliberately try to keep changing tact, because I think that is the key to longevity in a career. To continually surprise people. It just gets boring. If you start to do the same thing, it just gets boring on a personal level. I try to keep myself from being bored. I'm sort of a restless person, in general, so I try to do stuff that keeps me engaged.

Have you found over the years that you prefer indies to big studio productions, or vice versa?

I like the salary of one more than the other. [Laughs] It would be great gross participation in an indie film that becomes a monstrous hit. That would be like having your cake and eating it too. Look, I obviously don't pick things based on the size of their budgets -- you can see that from the stuff I've chosen to do. I'm just looking for people that seem like they're inspired and know the stories they want to tell; good scripts and characters that seem like I could do well with. It's as simple as that.

You mention good scripts, and I would imagine the adaptation of God of Carnage that Roman Polanski directed would qualify. What was that like for you -- especially being in a cast with such heavy-hitters?

It was amazing. Living in Paris, first of all, was amazing. I was there for about 10 weeks altogether. It's 90 minutes in real time in one location with these four people. It was a really intense experience getting to know everyone. Intense in a good way. Jodie Foster plays my wife, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz are the other couple; luckily there wasn't a diva in the bunch, Roman included, because it would have been tough. The set was the size of two rooms. We were in there everyday, all day, five days a week. Every character is in every minute of the script. There's no time jumps at all. It will be really interesting to see how it works as the film, because it really is -- this script you could perform on stage, easily. Even the movie version of the script. I heard it was coming out in October in Europe. It's going to be at the Venice Film Festival in September.

Speaking of other upcoming projects, what's the status on Step Brothers 2?

We've met, so we're talking about that. We're kinda in the spitballin' stage; we're thinking about it. Where it goes from here, I don't know. Whether it actually comes together, we'll see. I think we're all interested in it. No one wants to make a lame sequel, cause it's such a beloved movie; people really respond to that movie.

With The Hangover Part II being a notable exception, it seems that a lot of the successful studio comedies -- I'm thinking Anchorman, Wedding Crashers, Zoolander -- never get the sequel. Why do you think that is?

I think because most people are interested in doing the next original idea, creatively. The studio has been asking about doing a sequel to this movie for a long time, and all of our first reaction was like, "Well, we could do that, but we also just could do some other new movie." But, lately, we've been thinking it might be pretty fun to go back, and we've started to think of some ideas, and there's a lot. It's very fertile ground.

[Photo: Getty Images]

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