Steve Carell's The 40-Year-Old Virgin Was Shut Down Mid-Production For Absurd Reasons

20 years ago, when Judd Apatow made his since-classic feature directorial debut, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," it was a vastly different time for comedies (especially in America). The line to cross had been far wider, and you could get away with much more when it came to offensive and inappropriate humor in films than you can today. Whether you think that's good or bad, one thing's for sure: we'll never get another comedy like Apatow's first — not in this social climate. But even for the standards of the mid-aughts, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" pushed so many buttons back then that Universal Pictures had to shut production down on the third day of shooting because Apatow's actors were doing "too much improv."

For the film's 20^th anniversary, the writer-director was interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter and explained that the studio had various notes and serious concerns about how the movie was being made. He said:

"They had a bunch of notes, one of which was, Paul Rudd was too heavy. But I had asked Paul to be heavy — I just thought that was funny. And they thought that Steve looked like a serial killer, which he did. He had these glasses, and he was wearing a Jeffrey Dahmer-type Members Only jacket. There was some concerns that I was shooting it to look too much like an indie — maybe the lighting was not comedy-bright.

We thought, 'Maybe it's not playing because it's not edited together,' because we were doing so much improv. All the scenes that we had shot that led us to get shut down are in the movie and killed."

Sure, the multitude of gay jokes and immature insults might've been a little too much in retrospect (Seth Rogen said so, too), but at the same time, it was socially encouraged for guys to act like that amongst each other back then. They teased and mocked and told nasty anecdotes about sex and embarrassing hook-ups, but that's exactly what made their rapport and friendship highly relatable. The quartet of Andy (Steve Carell), David (Paul Rudd), Jay (Romany Malco), and Cal (Seth Rogen) is hilarious and endearing because they support one another the way dudes normally do — through relentless banter and vicious humor. There was something freeing about seeing four fellas do that on the big screen in 2005, and after all, they did it for a good cause: to get Steve Carell laid and make us laugh.

Of course, the movie's cast was so stacked with fantastic actors besides our core four — like Elizabeth Banks, Catherine Keener, Jane Lynch, Leslie Mann, Gary Bednob, and so on — that it would've been harder to mess it up than not. Still, Apatow and Carell's script (for which the seed came from Carell's early years as an actor) was crucial in succeeding, even if some of the funniest moments eventually came from improvisation. It's just a really fun and memorable movie (no one who grew up in the aughts will ever forget the waxing scene) that came at the right time to blow up the box office and define the zeitgeist of those years. No wonder it's ranked among some of the best comedies ever.