This may be a step down for Steve Carell. He’s gone from working with Anne Hathaway in Get Smart, to starring opposite a beaver puppet. Maybe it’s a sexy beaver puppet.

HR says Carell could play the lead in a movie called The Beaver. He’d play a man who walks around with a beaver puppet on his hand, a beaver puppet which he treats as if it’s a human creature. The script is described as “whimsical and winning”. I’m going to go ahead and also throw out weird.

It’s being compared to Being John Malcovich meets Lars and the Real Girl, which means it’s probably artsy fartsy. It wouldn’t hurt for Steve to try his hand at serious acting. He pulled off a lot of that rather brilliantly in The 40 Year-Old Virgin, though it’s often overlooked in favor of focusing on the scene in which he smokes pot out of an apple bong. He also did a little of that serious acting stuff last year for Dan in Real Life, but the movie’s heavy-handed script didn’t do him any favors. This Beaver script on the other hand, seems to have a lot of positive buzz, especially for a script about a man draping his hand in felt, gluing on googly eyes, and then talking to it.