Zach Galifianakis is already pretty recognizable after breaking out in the first two Hangover movies. But the comedian has to admit that he doesn’t like getting recognized.
“I have a really strange relationship with it,” he told Moviefone. “I was walking down the street the other day and I see this poster for this movie The Campaign and I just look at it and in the back of my mind I go, ‘Oh yeah, I’m in a movie.’ You’re forced to talk about yourself. That’s the big difference—trying to keep observing things that are funny and not be defensive. I don’t like to be recognized and I try to keep quiet and I don’t go to parties. I don’t do that kind of thing. The hardest part is to observe things that are funny, like I used to observe, without worrying about high schoolers wanting to talk to me. Who wants to talk to a high schooler? Before I was in the movie business I used to cross the street if I saw teenagers coming down the street. Now I’ve got to chat with them?”
But Galifianakis did enjoy getting to make The Campaign with Will Ferrell. The actor said, “Will and I had lunch and Will said, ‘That character’—meaning the character that would go onto become Marty Huggins—‘we should do something with that character, we should figure something out.’ The combination of Will saying that he wanted to do something with that character and him being a part of it, it was a pretty easy decision. I had known him and he’s a really sweet guy and one of the funniest guys around.”
Marty, who goes up against Ferrell’s Cam Brady in a dirty political battle in the film, was a character Galifianakis had worked on before. “I had been doing this character since high school, and then forgot about it, and then I had started doing it in my stand-up, and now he’s in the movie,” he said.
Galifianakis is interested in branching out from just comedies. “I do, guiltily, have a chip on my shoulder with the dramatic stuff, meaning that I like to do it,” he said. “Smaller movies are hard to make because they don’t come by that often and they’re hard to finance.”
The Campaign is in theaters now.
