Mensch At Work

After The Office, The 40-year-old Virgin, And Foxcatcher, Is Steve Carell Only Now Showing Us What Hes Really Capable Of? The Nicest Guy In Showbiz Talks About His Three New Oscar-Buzzworthy Moviesplus Why The Office Wouldnt Fly In The #timesup Era.

- Bruce Handy

I will tell you up front (at the risk of making you turn the page, but honesty and humility are in part the subject matter here): This may be the least sexy movie-star profile you will ever read. Because you know that thing where you meet a movie star and right off you bond over taking your high-school-aged kids on college tours? No, I don’t know that thing, either. But it’s what happened when I met Steve Carell this past summer. He had spent much of the year with his seventeen-year-old daughter, visiting prospective schools around the country. I recently went through that process with my own two children. So, as is often the case with middle-aged parents in coastal enclaves, we began lamenting the professionalization of the admissions process, the way so many families now hire test-prep tutors and essay coaches and interview consultants, and the awful stress that puts on kids who, being teenagers, already have enough to worry about without having to deal with the drudgery and anxiety of applying to twenty colleges. (No joke: That’s practically a norm in the 2010s.)

“It’s a science now,” Carell, who is fifty-six, marveled. “It’s very different than when I went to high school. I had a list of, like, four colleges, and I applied and I went to one. I didn’t put that much thought into it.” Me neither, with my three-school lottery back in the mid-1970s. We agreed it was a parent’s job to keep the kids from coming unglued or turning into monstrous, Ivy-seeking missiles, to reassure them that they’ll get in somewhere and that, more likely than not, they’ll have a great time at that somewhere—and if not, they can always transfer.

Sound parental counsel. As I said, this may be the least sexy movie star profile you will ever read.