HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — From producer Chris Meledandri comes the story of one of the world’s greatest super-villains who meets his biggest challenge when three children enter his life. In a happy suburban neighborhood surrounded by white picket fences and flowering rose bushes sits a black house with a dead lawn. Unbeknownst to the neighbors, hidden deep beneath this home is a vast secret hideout. Surrounded by an army of mischievous little minions, we discover Gru (Steve Carell) planning the biggest heist in the history of the world. He is going to steal the moon (Yes, the moon!).
Gru delights in all things wicked. Armed with his arsenal of shrink rays, freeze rays and battle-ready vehicles for land and air, he vanquishes all who stand in his way. That is, until the day he encounters the immense will of three little orphaned girls who look at him and see something that no one else has ever seen: a potential Dad.
Appearing alongside Carell in Despicable Me are comedy stars Jason Segel, Miranda Cosgrove and legendary Academy Award-winner Julie Andrews.
The troupe of established and emerging comedic actors who joins them includes Russell Brand, Kristen Wiig, Will Arnett, Danny McBride and Jack McBrayer.
Also see: Despicable Me Cast Interviews
To choose the comedy’s primary super-villain, a character who is at his wit’s end trying to become the best in his profession, the team members had to look no further than a former collaborator. Performer Carell is known to millions of fans through his roles on television’s The Office and popular films including The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Get Smart and Date Night, but it was his voice that most interested the filmmakers. He first worked with Meledandri on Horton Hears a Who!, in which he vocalized the role of the Mayor of Who-ville.
“Steve has great pathos in his voice, but his voice also carries his comedy effectively,” says Meledandri. “Working with him is unique because he comes to the process as an actor, an improviser and a writer. It’s rare that Steve will not give you a version of the scene that everybody agrees has just taken that comic or dramatic sequence and made it significantly better. The process of working with him is one of discovery. You never quite know where he’s going, and yet he always takes you to a place that’s a more elevated level than where you started.”
When the team sat down with Carell to discuss his ideas about a vocal approach to Gru, Carell made the observation that great villains in movies have very memorable voices, and he didn’t want the audience to pinpoint the accent. Explains Meledandri: “Carell started to play with different vocals that involved accents, and he came up with one that lands somewhere between Ricardo Montalban and Bela Lugosi. As soon as he started playing with that voice, it began to inform our visual conception of the character.”
It wasn’t only the opportunity to play a villain that attracted Carell to the project. “The story is really sweet,” he offers. “That’s what drew me to it. As crazy as Gru sounds and as diabolical and mean and awful as he is, there is humanity to him. It comes out in little bits, all the way through. It says a lot about how people can change, and how aspects of a person can come to the surface, given a different circumstance. People aren’t either good or evil…there’s always some good to evil and there’s always some evil within good. When you see someone who on the surface just seems despicable, and then they’re not, that’s interesting and fun to explore.”
Carell also appreciated how Gru was in competition with Vector to win the title of World’s Best Villain. “It’s very frustrating for Gru to be the second-best villain in the world, because he’s a perfectionist,” the actor adds. “He’s somebody who takes pride in his work, and he wants to be the best at being bad. But there’s someone out there who is upstaging him…and he doesn’t like it a bit.”
