craveonline

A big budget Hollywood movie like Get Smart is a closed set full of secrets. When the studio lets press visit to interview the stars, everyone is still careful not to give away too much. In that vein, with the film still months away from release on June 20, we don't want to give up all our scoops yet either. Here's a taste of our conversations with Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway on the set of Get Smart.

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CraveOnline: You’ve played a lot of guys in suits whether they’re anchormen or office workers or secret agents. What do you think is this predilection towards suits?

Steve Carell: Well, first of all I sleep in a suit. That’s just me personally. I have 80-90 suits in my closet and that’s all I wear. I don’t know. Because I went from The Daily Show where I was a fake news guy on a fake news show to Bruce Almighty where I played a news guy to Anchorman where I played a news guy, now I tend to gravitate towards suits. I don’t know. Apparently people just want to see me in a suit, because clearly they don’t want to see me in the nude so probably a suit is the best bet.

CraveOnline: How have you prepared for the action scenes that are in Get Smart?

Steve Carell: Ju Jitsu for 15 years. Tae Kwan do for the last 8 months straight 8 hours a day. I’ve been working out. Frankly, I knew some of these things would kill me if I didn’t. There are some stunts in this that Pete [Segal], our director, will say, "Um, do you think you can do that?" And of course 50 people are standing around and you say, "Yeah, sure. Hang me up by the ceiling and I’ll fly in and smash against the side of the bus." It’s been really fun. The people that are hanging you from wires and crashing you into things are so good that I have a very high level of trust. You kind of have to in order to commit to it. To be able to sort of act while you’re hanging 30 feet in the air repelling off of an airplane or something.

CraveOnline: How would you compare your Maxwell Smart to the original?

Steve Carell: The original’s better. That’s all I’ll say. How can I compare them? I don’t want to do an impression of Don Adams. I don’t want to channel him but I want to do the character justice. I don’t want the Maxwell Smart character to be perceived of as sort of a bumbling idiot. He’s not an Inspector Clousseau. He’s proficient and he can take care of himself. He’s sort of gets the job done counter-intuitively but he gets the job done. In the original series he could fight and he wasn’t an idiot but he was certainly eccentric and he was a very much by the book, straight-laced sort of guy and that’s more of the tact that I’m taking. That’s the approach that I think will set it apart from being a spy spoof.

CraveOnline: Are you tempted to do his voice at times?

Steve Carell: Not really. Sometimes it’s the voice you just hear in your head and I think there’s a kind of stiffness to the character that sort of parallels what he was doing. I don’t know. We’ll see about our new found catch phrases.