In addition to the usual SNL crew - Molly Shannon, Colin Quinn and Mark McKinney all have bit parts - the filmmakers got Loni Anderson to play Butabi mère, and they persuaded former 21 Jump Street co-star Richard Grieco to play himself. I don’t think we made any effort to see if Jim was available to do anything in it, and I know he didn’t call us.”īut it wouldn’t be an SNL movie without some celebrity cameos. “We knew there wasn’t any way we could get Jim Carrey to do it with us,” says Ferrell, “and we just thought it would be a cleaner thing if we just kept it to the two guys. In fact, most people who recognize the Butabi brothers at all seem to think they’re a Jim Carrey routine.Ĭarrey’s name is mentioned once during the film - a nightclub owner (an amusing Chazz Palminteri) yells his name and waves across the dance floor at one point - but he never actually appears in the film. The sketch began as a two-person act, but there have been some memorable three-person variations, beginning a year or two ago when Jim Carrey joined the brothers during an SNL guest-hosting stint. But Amy, in particular, identified with these characters or something, so she was like, ‘What do you think?’ And we were like, ‘Oh, yeah, okay.’ It wasn’t so much that we lobbied for it as that she did, and we were kind of like, ‘Well, this would be a fun experience and a nice opportunity,’ so we went forward with it.” Says Ferrell, “ didn’t necessarily have this in our heads as movie material. In fact, her name comes up several times during the thirteen-minute interview. So how did this sketch get picked in the first place? Ferrell credits co-producer Amy Heckerling, director of Clueless and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, with getting the film off the ground. We found that having them in the same family helped to set up that loser mid-twentysomething slacker-who-doesn’t-know-what-to-do-with-their-life set-up.” We just locked ourselves in a room, and between myself and Chris and Steve Koren, who helped us write the sketch, we improvised a lot of it, like how we thought these guys would talk and sound and react and whether or not they’re just friends or in the same family. So we just had this blank page that we had to fill from scratch. “It’s kind of this physical cartoon, is the best way to describe it. “The sketch is pretty much only on one level,” Ferrell says in a phone interview from Toronto. Ferrell himself admits that the film had to be created pretty much from scratch. In fact, until A Night at the Roxbury brought these guys - played by Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan - to the big screen, no one had any idea that they were even brothers.

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