Adam McKay reveals mass collapse with Will Ferrell

Two years after the breakup, the director Adam McKay opened up about the feud between him and his former filmmaking partner Will Ferrell. While talking to Vanity Fair about his new one Netflix project Don’t look up, McKay is candid about the tensions between the two, explaining how it all started and where it is now. McKay said the duo has yet to say anything about it, thanks to an incident that happened in the upcoming series about Jerry Buss.

The misunderstanding started while McKay was working on HBO limited series that follows similar events from the book Show time about the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s. McKay cast Ferrell as Buss, the legendary 80s team owner who has a crush on Ferrell’s real-life best friend. John C. Reilly.

“The truth is, the way the show has always been done, it’s surreal,” he said. “And Ferrell doesn’t look like Jerry Buss, and he doesn’t look like Jerry Buss. And there were some participants who said, ‘We love Ferrell, he’s a genius, but we couldn’t see him do it.’ It was a somewhat difficult discussion.”

But McKay, who has worked with Ferrell on projects like Anchorman and Step brother, hesitant to switch: “Didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” he explains. “Want to be respected.”

However, he reprized Reilly in the role, angering Ferrell. What makes the bond between the two even stronger is that McKay wasn’t the first to call Ferrell with the news – Reilly was.

“I should have called him, but I didn’t,” McKay said. “And of course Reilly did, because Reilly, he’s a stand-up guy.”

So in 2019, the duo released a joint statement announcing their breakup. While the statement sounded cordial, saying that they would always be friends, McKay has now clarified the fact that they are not on good terms.

“I said, ‘I mean, we’re splitting the company,’” McKay recalls. “And he basically said, ‘That’s right,’ and he was basically, ‘Have a good life.’ And I said, ‘Fuck, Ferrell will never talk to me again.’ So it didn’t end well.”

To this day, McKay says he regrets how he handled the decision to recur: “I failed at how I handled that,” lamented McKay. “Keeping the streets clean is the old thing. I should have just done everything according to the book.”

McKay continued: “In my head, I thought, ‘We’re going to let this end. Six months to a year, we’ll sit down, we’ll laugh about it and go, It’s all a trifle, who gives an asshole? We have worked together for 25 years. Do we really want to ignore this? ‘”

He ended by saying that Ferrell “considered it to be a deeper way of hurting than I ever imagined and I tried to reach out to him, and I reminded him of some of the mild behavior that had followed. My way of never being sorry.”