Covert's latest project is Strange Wilderness, a comedy about a wildlife TV show production team that journeys off to capture footage of no less than Bigfoot himself. The actor and producer recently spoke to IGN via phone where he discussed his character in the film, his approach to finding and developing roles, and his creative partnership with Adam Sandler.
IGN Movies: Maybe just to get started you could tell us about the character you play and what's going on with him in the movie.
Allen Covert: Well, I play Fred Wolf, not to be confused with the writer-director of the movie [named] Fred Wolf, and basically I've been Steve Zahn's right-hand man and best friend on his TV show. I do everything. I do sound, I do editing, and basically we're the two head idiots of this really bad wildlife show. We're about to get cancelled -- Jeff Garlin decides that our ratings suck and he says we're cancelled in two weeks. So we figure out that the only way to save the show is to buy this map we know of that tells us where Bigfoot lives. We take our whole crew in a Winnebago and we're going to find Bigfoot, get him on film and save our show. And a lot of animal mauling happen [laughs]. And by that I mean animals mauling us; actors were injured in the shooting of this movie, no animals.
IGN: You've enjoyed a great creative partnership with Adam Sandler for several years now at Happy Madison Productions. Does that mean you automatically have a role in each film if you want one, and how do you determine what part you want to play?
Covert: Well, it depends. A lot of times, yeah -- the way we basically work at Happy Madison is we do whatever needs to be done, so like on Benchwarmers it's like I wrote Benchwarmers but I'm not in it. I was on set overseeing some stuff on occasion, but I wasn't there all of the time so I didn't produce that. This one was literally I was going on vacation and I knew we were doing this movie and [I] hadn't read the script yet, so I took the script on the plane to see if I had any notes, any ideas, or whatever. By the time the plane landed I was calling the office to say, "I have to be in this movie. Tell Fred to please put me anywhere in this movie." So, yeah, I do have that great option of saying, "Please, please, please." But if it's not something I'm going to fit [into] I'm not going to force it. You know, we just produced a film this summer with Anna Faris where I was looking at it and knew I was going to be on the set every day as a producer, but there was literally nothing for me to do as an actor. So I said, "Fine, I'm just producing the film." It is nice to have that, to see the script ahead of time and go, "Hey, that's a really funny part. Maybe I could be that guy." If it's like that, maybe we'll tailor it a little more towards me. But that's the good thing about our process: Once we figure out who's playing what parts, that helps the writing.
IGN: I've read that you have gained a significant amount of weight for some of your past performances. Is that accurate?
Covert: I gained the weight on purpose for Little Nicky, and it was one of those cases where I'd done a few roles where I looked the same way, and I wanted to be the roommate because I thought that was the funniest part for me. Literally, one night Sandler called me and said, "I figured it out. You need to shave a receding hairline in your head and gain about 20 pounds and you'll be perfect." I literally just started eating donuts. Now, on Mr. Deeds I had quit smoking and just happened to be fat [laughs]. I looked up one day and said, "I guess I'm going to be fat in this movie." That's the one they said I gained the weight on purpose, and I'm here to tell you no, I had just quit smoking and I was just a fat load. That is the movie that when I saw it projected on the big screen made me go on a diet and lose 40 pounds. There's a scene where I'm naked and I'm walking towards Peter Gallagher from the waist up, and I was watching it projected and my boobs bounced, and I said, "OK, stop eating!"
IGN: In other words it's not so much a matter of transforming yourself as finding a role that suits your sensibilities.
Covert: Yeah, and also a little something different, like oh, I've never played a guy like this, or a fun little thing to come in and do. On this one, it's a matter of look. I'm not going to stand there and look like myself, so I have really long hair and a moustache. But it was also because that's kind of what this guy felt like. He just seems like one of those kind of burnt-out pseudo '60s guys.
IGN: Just looking at the trailer, the material in Strange Wilderness seems to lend itself to improvisation. Do you find that you're more comfortable as an improvisational actor or are you happier when you have a script to follow?
Covert: Personally, I'm a little more confident when I have a script. Even though we like to do a lot of improv, we always get what we wrote first. Even on this, where we had Justin Long and Jonah Hill going crazy -- they would be in a scene together and we would just keep rolling because they were so nuts -- we always got what Fred had written. So you get the bases and you know, "We got what we think we want" [Then we'd go], "Now let's see what else there is." Sometimes whatever you see is "what else there is," but like I said I like to get that base of whatever it is we think we needed. Let's move on and better it. But also it's even like you might do the scene for the first time and go, "Wow, that sucks." And then you sit down and rewrite it real quick. When you have guys like we had -- like Kevin Heffernan and Dante and Jonah and Ashley Scott and all of those guys -- then you can just say, "This isn't working. What if we just did a scene like this, or you say this, and just go?" These guys are all pros and they know what they're doing, but it's also fun because you get a lot of good jokes, especially people from people like this cast.
IGN: The trailers feature some really funny voiceover combined with actual wildlife footage. How will that be integrated into the film?
Covert: That's in the movie. Those are examples of our show. We cut to certain segments of our show, because part of the thing is that as we're going to find Bigfoot, we're also filming shows along the way. It's like whatever we see like, "Oh, look! There's bugs on that tree. Let's do a quick episode about bugs." That's the kind of wildlife people that we are. But then after a scene of filming we can actually go to the animal footage, and that's kind of where the genesis of the entire movie was from. Peter Gaulke and Fred Wolf, who are the characters we play, had this great animal footage and they started doing funny voiceover to it. They literally had this stuff around for years, and then came to us and we did a bunch of movies with them. He'd been wanting to do this, so the people who financed Grandma's Boy said, "Yeah, we'll do this one."
IGN: Are there general or consistent challenges on movies like this from one production to the next, or is it more a matter of working on a specific character and making him your own?
Covert: It's a combo. Because it's a Happy Madison movie that means I was involved in a little more than just acting, and also to me I enjoyed doing both Grandma's Boy and Strange Wilderness because they were completely different from what we'd been doing lately. But also on the technical end in that they were very small-budgeted movies that we shot in town and we had to get them done in a certain time, and I'm glad that we were able to pull them off and have it look like a big, regular-sized movie. I really enjoyed that, but also it just literally was the script that made me laugh so hard that it was something that I was just like, "God, we have to be involved in this." Kind of the way I feel about the movie that Sandler is shooting right now, that I'm not involved in but I sit there in the editing room going, "Dear God, why aren't I involved in this?"
