On "The Office," Andy Bernard is no Saint Bernard -- he's the obnoxious braggart we love to laugh at, as long as we're not actually working with him. Happily, Ed Helms, who plays him, seems one of the nicest guys around.
Born and raised in Atlanta, he exhibits what he's called Southern good manners. Yet, both as Andy and, before that, one of the satirical correspondents on "The Daily Show," Helms has made bullying pomposity a high art.
Now he co-stars with Justin Bartha, Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis in "The Hangover," opening Friday, a guy-comedy about four friends' inadvertent drug-blackout misadventures in Las Vegas. Here, Helms goes the other way as a nice-guy dentist bullied by his girlfriend (Rachael Harris) and who, with his buds, must deal with a lost night, a found tiger, a baby, marriage with a stripper ( Heather Graham) and Mike Tyson lip-synching Phil Collins.
Helms spoke last week with Frank Lovece.
Q. Your character through most of the movie has a missing tooth, which happened during their missing night. How'd they do the effect? CGI (computer-generated imagery)?
A. No, it's not CGI. I'd gotten an implant when I was a teenager, and -- cut to 20 years later -- this part and this movie called for a missing tooth. And I asked my dentist and he was able to take it out!
Q. Ah, c'mon. For real?
A. I'm dead serious! And if you really look closely, it's pretty clear it's real. When (the idea) originally came up, we did camera tests with some alternative processes. We tried to black it out and then they made a prosthetic that sort of covered my teeth but had a gap in it, which made me look like a donkey, so I vetoed that. We were sort of talking about losing the joke altogether. And I said hold on a second, and that's when I called my dentist. And it worked! It would have been really expensive to digitally remove it.
Q. Speaking of that, were you ever physically on the set with the tiger, or digitally inserted later?
A. It was an actual tiger and I was on the set with the tiger -- actually three tigers. You can't work with a tiger for longer than a certain amount of time, so they had three of them there. We were on set with them together way more than we should have been!
Q. What was scarier, the tiger or Mike Tyson?
A. The tiger. Mike Tyson was just great.
Q. A pussycat, you might say.
A. (Laughs) I'm not sure I'd go that far!
Q. I keep reading how "The Hangover 2" is in the planning stage even before "The Hangover" is released.
A. If that is true, it's the biggest jinx you can possibly put on a movie! I think Warner Bros. is excited about this movie, so they're talking about (a sequel), but, look, if this movie doesn't do well, you're gonna see that sequel quietly slip away.
Q. I dunno. We got "Punisher: War Zone."
A. (Laughs) Good point! Good point!
