Fans have known this for years, but while on TODAY promoting his new film "Casa de mi Padre," Will Ferrell confirmed it to Matt Lauer: "I'm a genius, man. I'm a genius."
"Genius" and sort-of-kind-of-fluent Spanish speaker, as it turns out. Ferrell made a risky move with his new film by speaking only Spanish in it and at one point even singing. (Everything is subtitled for the Spanish-challenged among us). "I started working with a translator about a month prior to filming," he explained, "and then it was literally every day and every night. I started dreaming in Spanish."
He was even able to compliment Lauer's hairline on request: "Senor Lauer, tu cabeza es muy guapo," he said. "Your head is very handsome."
"Padre" is a comedy, but Ferrell plays it very straight, describing it as a bad Mexican spaghetti Western-meets-'Scarface'-meets Quentin Tarantino. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to ad-lib, since he had to stick to speaking Spanish.
But he was able to have a love scene that he rates -- on a scale of 1 to 10 -- as a zero. "This is the most unsexy sex scene ever committed to film. But yet the silliest I think I've ever seen," he said.
Well, even geniuses aren't perfect.
But they do apparently love kicking back and relaxing: Ferrell turned up with "Padre" co-star Nick Offerman later on during the fourth hour of TODAY to offer a more laid-back chat -- both men had donned bathrobes and were sipping Bloody Marys -- with Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford.
"It's so relaxing here (at TODAY)," said Ferrell. "The whole place is like a spa." He then turned to an unshaven Offerman and asked, "Are you as drunk as I am?"
"Absolutely," said Offerman. "Three sheets."
Offerman later revealed dryly that he "refused" to do the film several times, noting that it took his wife, Megan Mullally, to talk him into it. "I was sedated by my wife and Will came over and there was a whole intervention ... and at the end of it I had signed a contract. And it's a three picture deal. We have a German picture coming up."
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