From the Set of Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg’s Daddy’s Home

Outside New Orleans there sits a nondescript house; two stories, wood floors, family photos, Christmas decorations, tire marks going up the wall on the stairs, a Will Ferrell-sized hole in the wall, the usual features. The weirdest part about the house, in fact, is that it’s not even a real house, it’s been constructed entirely on a stage for the upcoming comedy film Daddy’s Home. Even weirder still, since demand is so high for production space in Louisiana, the house isn’t even built on a traditional stage, it’s been constructed inside an empty storage facility at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility. You’d never know it though once you’ve stepped inside and seen it all.

Daddy’s Home is about family, not in the same way that other seasonal comedies exaggerate the dynamics of a family unit, but beyond the crazy antics that sprout out, it has roots in reality. Will Ferrell’s Brad has fallen in love with and married Linda Cardellini’s Sarah, who has two children from her first marriage with Mark Wahlberg’s Dusty. To top it all off, Brad and Dusty couldn’t be more different, and that becomes crystal clear as they vie for the attention of the kids and the supremacy of being the one true Dad.

“Whenever I hear ‘family movie,’ I think Old Yeller,” director Sean Anders, whose previous works include Sex Drive and Horrible Bosses 2, tells us. “This isn’t quite that, but no, it’s actually been really fun. Rated R is a lot of fun because of the freedom it affords but it has its own sort of crutches and boundaries. A lot of times there’s a push for things to be, well if we’re going to the trouble of making it rated R, let’s go really crazy and super hard R and whatever, and that can be really fun, but this is really fun to not have that pressure and just be able to tell a story and not worry about making it completely crazy.”

Ferrell’s Brad is the straight-laced side of the coin in the film. A gentle and soft spoken man who works at an easy listening radio station called The Panda. Thanks to an unlikely accident courtesy of an X-ray machine at a dentist’s office, he’s unable to conceive children, so being a father is quite literally a dream come true for him. On the other side is Wahlberg’s Dusty, a former special ops soldier with tales as tall as Ferrell, and they’re all true.

“Every time he says something crazy, it turns out to be true, he’s actually done it,” Ferrell said. “So his tall tales are actually feats that he’s accomplished which is even more bewildering to me. But Dusty’s like a mythical character in a way, it’s hard to believe that this guy really exists, and my wife keeps saying, ‘I’m warning you, don’t let him into our lives,’ I’m like, ‘It’s going to be fine!’ And sure enough, he’s like a magical creature who wreaks havoc on my life.”

“I’m trying to do it in a not so traditional way, either,” Wahlberg said.. “I’m trying to be as pleasant and likable as possible for the most part until I put him in a horrible predicament…. We didn’t want it to be like, Oh, this guy’s a d***, we’ll root against him and we’ll root for him. We wanted it to be a little more.”

“He’s Lucy to my Charlie Brown,” Ferrell interjects. “Every time he pulls the football away and I try to kick it, he figures out another way to get me to try to kick the football again and I fall for it every time.”

The stakes start out simple enough in this “Dad competition” but quickly escalate to new heights, literally. What begins with who gives the better good night kisses turns to Wahlberg’s Dusty building a giant tree house for the kids, completing a project that Ferrell’s Brad had been putting off for two months.

“I’ve been working on it for a couple of months and it’s just two boards nailed onto it and he’s like, ‘Looking pretty good!’ And I come home the next day and it’s not only built fully with Dish TV and an Xbox but a fully functioning skateboard ramp and a DJ and sponsor…. So it’s like, the greatest backyard in the neighborhood and it’s all done by Dusty.”

Once Dusty doubles down on “winning,” Brad decides two can play that game and decorates the house for Christmas, despite the calendar clearly saying April, and presents the kids with a pony while dressed as Santa.

In addition to the tiny horse, Brad gets tickets for the family to go the Los Angeles Lakers play-off game. It seems he’s won this round, until they arrive at the arena and see one of the trainers for the team is a former teammate of Dusty’s, who spent time in Italy as a professional basketball player. The whole family goes down to the court to sit with the team and meet Kobe Bryant, who is thrilled to meet Dusty after hearing so many stories about him.

This sends Brad off the deep end, of course, and causes him to have a little too much to drink and then attempt a half-court shot. The attempt, as you can imagine, does not go in the basket, but instead hits a Laker Girl in the face.

The scene was shot during an actual Laker game too, and thanks to the wonders of context-free YouTube videos, some people thought Will Ferrell actually pelted a cheerleader in the face while drunk. You can watch the clip below.

“Those are the moments where I still forget there’s an internet out there,” Ferrell says with a smile. “Because you forget that everyone’s got a phone now and it’s just hilarious, the comments. They just read the headline, they don’t read that it’s part of a movie, so it’s a lot of comments like, ‘He should be sued!’ and ‘How dare he do that!’”

Ferrell has previous experience with shooting scenes for a movie during actual sporting events as well, going back to his work in Talladega Nights.

“You always write those scenes and you usually can’t get the parties involved to cooperate for whatever reason, but to get to shoot at an NBA game and get to do all these things and have it all fall into place is so great for a movie like this.”

Director Sean Anders went on to say that the NBA sequence was one of the most exciting things he’s ever been a part of, despite it only lasting six minutes.

“Everybody was pretty electrified, especially when we finished it up and it went so well at halftime and the audience got into it so much and we got so much extra energy out of that. It was a really great coordinated effort that took months to get all together and then to have it all come off in six minutes and come off as well as it did is pretty exciting.”

Caught between Ferrell and Wahlberg’s characters is Linda Cardellini’s Sarah, who tries not to participate in the outlandish antics that surround her family but is still dragged along for the ride.

“She’s trying to be patient because she really wants Dusty to be in the kids’ lives. At the same time, Brad is such a zealous stepfather. She knows she’s lucky to have that. So she’s trying to blend the two of them, also knowing that Dusty is sort of a mastermind, integrating his way into every situation. She has a lot to deal with. They bring a lot of crazy things home to her, and she’s trying to be as patient as possible, but at some point the dam breaks.”

If you’re going to be caught between warring fathers in a comedy film, who better than to have Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg on either side, especially when you can also weave some heart into it.

“The energy between those guys, it’s really fun to be in the middle of it. I’m really lucky to get the part,” Cardellini added. “I think it’s a really sweet story about a family that’s gone through divorce and she’s trying to put this bigger unit of family together, trying to get the two dads to co-dad together. Trying to blend your families is something I think people can relate to. It’s really sweet how these two guys get to it.”

“Linda’s such a good sport too,” Wahlberg adds. “Dealing with all my caveman antics because every chance I get I’m trying to grab her, throw her over my shoulder, take a whiff of her hair, every time in front of (Will).”

Another unexpected addition to the circle of chaos in the film is stand up comedian Hannibal Burress, who plays Griff, a handyman that comes around after Ferrell Crashes a motorcycle inside the house and simply never leaves. He went on to tell us about his time working with a baby on the film and how it will probably end up as a joke in his stand-up routine.

“It was Monday, and so you have to hold the baby, which seems simple. It wasn’t even an emotional scene where I have to give a speech to the baby. I say one line to the baby and then pull it a little bit back towards me. But there’s a big process to it where you can’t just have one baby because babies aren’t responsible. So they have three babies, and they had a tent a little bit off-set where I met the mother and the baby, just us three. Because a baby can’t just pop on set like ‘Hey, what’s going on guys? Big fan. Excited to work. Thanks for the opportunity.’ I had to meet the baby, and talk with it. And I haven’t been around babies for a while, so it’s kind of weird, and my emotions are stilted. It’s not natural to me. So the first two babies, they didn’t want any part of it… and I was trying to calm these babies down, you know. ‘If you shut the f*** up for a little bit, you might get a SAG card out of this s***.’ but you know, they’re babies, so they want to be with their mom. They don’t know me. But the third baby was really chill. That was good. The third baby was chilled out. We got three takes, like a g**d*** pro. Signed his W-9 and got out of there.”

Buress’ Griff goes on to plant himself in the family too, sticking around for big moments despite having no connection to them in the slightest. Will Ferrell spoke about bringing Buress on to the film and the advantage of having a side character.

“I think he’s one of the smartest, funniest stand ups out there today and he just, in these scenes, you forget he’s in the scene and he’ll pop his head in and have a comment or an off-beat line that is just always great to cut to….Yesterday we shot a scene where I’m trying to have another moment where I’m like, I gotta kick him out, like it’s just getting [to be] too much, and these guys are watching ‘Frozen’ but Dusty’s never seen it and is like, ‘This movie is great!’ They’re making the biggest deal out of ‘Frozen,’ but Hannibal won’t pause it because he doesn’t want to ruin the momentum and I’m like, ‘We’re not in the theater!’ ‘I’m trying to create the theater experience here in your house!’”

Sean Anders went on to describe a scene between Ferrell and Buress, using it as an example of the tone they’re looking to maintain throughout the film.

“We definitely wanted the tone to not be so silly that it couldn’t have a little heart or it couldn’t get into some of the real issues between the characters. So what we keep kind of finding are these places where, I’ll give you a really good example of something that I’m really proud of in the movie, there is a moment where Hannibal comes in to give Will a key piece of information and it’s a very sort of dramatic ‘movie moment.’ It’s a moment that you’ve seen in a lot of movies at that time in the story where you would see a moment like that. So rather than sort of playing the moment, we do play the moment but then the moment gets interrupted and then the characters spend a bunch of time talking about that moment like, ‘Oh, we were going ot have a moment here but it just got weird.’”

We watch a scene play out in the house as the family experiences a tender bonding moment, the kind of cohesion that can be expected after the collision of dad vs. step-dad in a film like this. Over the course of a few takes it becomes clear that improvisation is a big factor on the set, which shouldn’t surprise you given the comedic backgrounds of the cast, and Sean Anders isn’t worried about all the additional dialogue being added either.

“A lot of times you get a little crazy on the day and you end up taking your three-page scene and turning it into a nine page scene and then you get into the edit bay and it just becomes the three page scene again, but that’s okay. You’re just mining for pearls the whole time, just looking for extra little beats and moments and laughs and looks and whatever you can find.”

Anders won’t have to look hard for those pearls either, be it of the comedic or heartfelt variety, and he’ll even find them both in the same scenes.

“One of my favorite scenes in the script was when the little girl invites Will to the daddy-daughter dance and she says before she asks him, ‘If I ask you something, do you promise you won’t cry?’ and he says ‘Yeah, sure,’ and she invites him to the dance and he starts to breakdown and cry and we just shot it the other day and it was really funny. I said to Will, ‘I think this might be my favorite scene so far,’ and Will said ‘It’s funny you say that because when I first read the script it was kind of intended for me to play the crazy biological dad and when I read that scene I said, ‘No I want to play the guy that cries when his daughter invites him to the dance.’ And he made that so funny, but at the same time really, really sweet because of course he’s breaking down because he’s so moved that she invited him.”

“There are not a lot of ‘traditional families’ anymore out there,” Ferrell adds. “I think everyone is either part of or knows of someone who have these different types of families between the stepparents and the biological parents and this and that, so it’s kind of fun to make a comment on that whole world.”

Paramount Pictures will release Daddy’s Home in theaters on Christmas Day. They’ve also launched a special Daddy’s Home Omaze campaign and, in the player below, you can catch full details from Ferrell and Wahlberg themselves!