Bloopers/outtakes are unavoidable when making a movie; eventually an actor will flub some lines, and sometimes something will happen that’ll cause one or more of the actors in a scene to start laughing. The instances of the latter happening increase significantly when making a comedy, and in the case of 2013’s Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, Paul Rudd nearly ruined a scene because he couldn’t stop cracking up from Will Ferrell’s ridiculous lines.
To set the stage, during Anchorman 2, Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy suffers a head injury that causes him to become temporarily blind. Unable to read the news and becoming depressed, he isolates himself in a lighthouse and is one day visited by his trusty news cohorts: Paul Rudd’s Brian Fantana, David Koechner’s Champ Kind and Steve Carrell’s Brick Tamland. Cue Rudd’s inability to keep a straight face, as he recently recalled (again, this is NSFW):
That was in Anchorman 2. He’s living in a lighthouse and he can’t even masturbate. I remember in the first one and the second one there were two scenes we could never make it through, we were laughing so hard he couldn’t even shoot. And that was the one in Anchorman 2. He’s blind and he’s talking about he can’t even masturbate. And we’re saying ‘Just because you’re blind you can’t?’ And Will is just a genius he’s just saying things and making it up. He had to pleasure himself to the memory of Mrs. Buttersworth’s, the bottle of syrup.
So not only is Ron Burgundy under the impression that he can barely pleasure himself simply because he lost his sight, but the only thing that does get him off is thinking about Mrs. Buttersworth, the famed syrup mascot. Yeah, I can’t blame Paul Rudd for not being able to keep it together upon repeatedly hearing such absurdity.
But it didn’t stop there, as Paul Rudd also had to contend with the cherry on this hilarity sundae centered around a blind Ron Burgundy and his warped perspective on reality. Rudd during his appearance on The Ringer:
He said ‘Now I know what those poor villagers of Pompeii experienced when they were rained down with hot ash and lava. Except in my case, it was not hot lava but hot, frothy, ejaculate.’
That… is an image I did not want in my head, but it’s going to be hard to get out for the rest of the day. Still, props to Will Ferrell coming up with improvising that line, and Paul Rudd also noted that Steve Carrell, who’s normally good about keeping it together, was “so far gone crying.” You can watch Paul Rudd recollect more memories of working on both Anchorman movies in the video below.
Coming out nine years after the first Anchorman, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues outperformed its predecessor at the box office with a $173 million+ haul. Critically speaking, it was met with decent reception among critics, ranking at 74% on Rotten Tomatoes, although the audience score is more mixed at 52%. While there has been talk over the years about possibly making Anchorman 3, for now, there’s no indication that the threequel is in official development.
Paul Rudd will next appear in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which was originally supposed to in July, but was moved to March 5, 2021 due to the current health crisis. Keep track of the movies that are still expected to come out later this year with our 2020 release schedule, or get a head start on next year’s offerings with the 2021 release schedule.
