I have profound respect for Sacha Baron Cohen, but Borat is not a particularly comfortable movie for me to sit through.

Ed Helms

Categorized in : Profound Comfortable

Probably my favorite thing about watching a movie that I'm in the first time is to see all the things I didn't know were happening in a scene around me.

favorites-things my-favorite firsts

With the tiger you're always on edge, and you always have to keep your distance. The monkey is far less threatening so you're more relaxed around the monkey, and I think that's actually hazardous.

monkeys distance thinking

It's just one of those things like when you're not supposed to laugh, it makes it that much harder to stop laughing. And for some reason Zach [ Galifianakis] and I get in this feedback mood of giggling, and on the set of Hangover we just couldn't get through stuff.

hangover stuff laughing

I've been to Indonesia, but I've never been to Thailand. I hear the people are lovely, the food is delicious, and that the heat and humidity are lethal.

heat-and-humidity lovely people

I loved the show Lost, in part because the writers were so nimble in how they would take things from previous episodes, that probably weren't created with any intent towards a larger narrative, and they would get woven into narratives in a really elegant and exciting way.

narrative woven way

[I read news] because no one's going to tell me what they really... by Ed Helms

[I read news] because no one's going to tell me what they really think of something.

Whenever I've messed around with radio-controlled things, there's always been a part of me that's thought, I wonder if there might actually be a little guy piloting these vehicles.

radio guy littles

I'm the worst in The Office. It's a problem. They've had to shut down the set for like 30 minutes because of me.

minutes office problem

One of the biggest breaks we had actually, one of the biggest, the hardest I laughed on the movie [The Hangover] was the baby was just doing ridiculous things and making hilarious faces. But I'm sitting there and I'm supposed to be having this exchange with Zach [ Galifianakis] and the baby is like staring at me with these huge eyes and acting, and just making the most cerebral faces, and I could not keep it together.

hangover eye baby

When I was 15 I lost a tooth and had an implant put in. Cut to 20 years later, I'm doing this part [Andy Bernard] and the script calls for my character to lose a tooth.

cutting character years

I lived in New York for 10 years, I loved it, I never second-guessed it. There were definitely times when I thought, "I will never leave this place." And I kind of got into that center-of-the-universe mindset.

kind new-york years

To be totally candid, it was really born out of a panic attack the summer between my sophomore and junior years, when I realized I wasn't going to graduate in four years unless I somehow managed to glue together all the courses I'd taken. That said, I'm really glad I did it, 'cause it was really fun, and I was able to just take whatever the hell I wanted.

taken summer fun

I'm sure I cause just as much consternation for editors as any other actor, but it definitely makes me feel more comfortable understanding how and why all the different camera setups exist.

cameras editors understanding

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting that, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want. And also, the problems editors run into when trying to edit performances - it helps me head that off at the pass a little.

editors running two

You make adjustments according to the specifics of the character.It's something I feel like a lot of my comedic heroes have always done. It's not even necessarily vulnerability, always, but it's an earnestness, a genuine desire to actually do the right thing, but then still make really misguided, stupid decisions along the way.

stupid hero character

As an actor, you can really play the intensity and gravity and seriousness of the moment, and just rely on the circumstances being funny. The joke is kind of the situation you're in, or the way you're reacting to something, as opposed to the characters just saying something witty.

play witty character

That's actually a rare thing to be on a set full of people that you admire and make you laugh all the time.

admire laughing people

No one employed [ chaos] better than Jim Henson, by the way, on The Muppets. He had all these chicken Muppets that just brought in the most glorious chaos to whatever scene they were a part of.

muppet chaos way

The scene [in The Hangover] where the tiger actually pops up behind us, that's actually a Jim Henson tiger puppet. The Jim Henson Company actually supplied that tiger. And it's really cool. Its entire face moves. It has like all these little motors in its eyebrows and cheeks and mouth. It was amazing.

hangover eyebrows moving

We spent six weeks there [in Vegas]. The only thing crazy that I did was shoot that movie [The Hangovers]. The stuff in that movie is way crazier than anything I might have done, drunk one night in Vegas. I mean we did it for real in the movie, so that's as crazy as it got.

hangover crazy real