Adam McKay has an idea for how a profile of Adam McKay should begin. 

“I would say,” suggests the writer and director of Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and The Big Short, “‘Adam McKay believes that personal profiles have destroyed America.’”

Adam McKay is speaking from his cramped home office in Los Angeles, where he wrote the script for Vice, the 2018 Dick Cheney biopic that blamed the former vice president for destroying America. The professional satirist has been hard at work.  

“I kind of like the idea that this is for Vanity Fair,” he goes on, “because in a way, the ‘vanity fair’ is over. Like, the idea of celebrity. Personal profiles are becoming really ridiculous. Who the fuck cares about Adam McKay?”

Adam McKay’s publicist might not agree with this take since Adam McKay has a $100 million Netflix movie he’s promoting, Don’t Look Up (in theaters December 10 and streaming December 24), which stars highly bankable celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Tyler Perry, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, and Jonah Hill. Then again, undermining the story is a very Adam McKay thing to do. One might even say it’s his superpower. Remember when he rolled the ending credits halfway through Vice, a joke on the fairy tale version of Cheney’s story? Or when, in The Big Short, Margot Robbie breaks the fourth wall to explain mortgage-backed securities from a bubble bath? And so Adam McKay’s critique of the Vanity Fair profile is merely professional instinct. Later he proposes a one-on-one basketball game to see who gets to write the opener of this story, an idea the writer nixed given that Adam McKay is six feet five and a basketball fanatic. (He still sends me several fictional openers, just in case.)

It’s true that we live in an era of cultural deflation, when it’s hard for any one person, short of a would-be dictator, to claim the attention of the entire culture, which long ago fractured along internet-drawn lines. In a sense, that’s what McKay’s latest movie is about. Two astronomers, played by DiCaprio and Lawrence, discover a world-destroying comet headed for earth and the political and media reaction to imminent doom is a hopeless farce of culture-war squabbling, narcissism, shallowness, and ignorance—in other words, pretty realistic. McKay says it’s also the most personal movie he’s ever made. “It combines a lot of my feelings over the past 10, 20, 30 years,” he says.  “A lot of it’s humor. A lot of it’s sadness. A lot of it’s fear and worry. It’s all in there.”

The script grew out of McKay’s alarm over climate change, what he calls “the biggest story in 66 million years. It’s the biggest story in the history of upright apes.” As it happens, McKay has had a spectacular run at making movies for upright apes. He’s now the kind of director who gets to cast DiCaprio as a schlubby Midwesterner and Meryl Streep as a toxic Trump-like president—as he does in Don’t Look Up—and to use what he calls “the big kids’ toys” of Hollywood to articulate his cinematic op-eds. “This is a populist movie,” he insists. “This is a movie meant to be seen by large amounts of people.”

But success, as we’re obliged to say in the personal-profiles business, has come at a price—bouts of depression, a heart attack, a rotating cast of therapists, a tortured relationship with his mother, and a bitter breakup with his former creative partner Will Ferrell. As it turns out, every movie is the most personal movie Adam McKay’s ever made—until it’s over and he moves on to the most personal movie he’d ever made. On one level, it’s the nature of his art—locating the pulse of the zeitgeist and making entertainment from it before the zeitgeist moves on. And McKay is nothing if not a topical writer and director. But it begs a question: How does Adam McKay move on from a movie about the end of the world? 

After I’m buzzed in to Adam McKay’s more than 70-acre compound and escorted into his backyard by Daniel, his six-foot-nine bodyguard slash piano teacher, I am almost immediately speechless.

I had read about McKay’s treehouse but had no idea of just how massive and elaborate it is. A 12-acre network of platforms, rooms, and even a hot tub are connected by rope swings, ladders, and tubes 80 feet off the ground. 

McKay comes zip-lining right at me at an incredible speed from the top of a 100-foot-tall sequoia.

“Hey!” he says when he lands, grabbing my arm in a Gladiator-style arm-clasp greeting. “Do you want some beet juice?”

When McKay greets me at the door of his modest-for-Hollywood house in the leafy Hancock Park district of Los Angeles, he’s still in a T-shirt, gym shorts, and New Balance sneakers after working out with Darren, his trainer. For the next four hours he’ll keep a towel draped around his neck as if he just emerged from an NBA locker room. Twenty years ago, McKay was diagnosed with an essential tremor, which means his neck and head, and sometimes his voice, quaver involuntarily, not unlike Katharine Hepburn (“I call it ‘my friend Arnold’ and you never know when Arnold is going to visit”). During interviews, he lies on his back to stabilize his tremor, giving the impression of a guy who’s more laid-back than his endless list of writing, directing, and producing credits would suggest. The towel is less a Hollywood affectation than a Linus-like security blanket.

An avowed democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders stan, and longtime Twitter warrior, McKay might come off as a caricature of a Hollywood liberal if he wasn’t hyperaware of his own ripeness as comedy material. “I’m a 53-year-old white guy, and it happened that I chose a profession that pays probably a hundred times more than it should,” McKay says. “If there’s justice in the world, I’d probably be making $140,000 a year. My daughter looks at me like I’m the fucking Monopoly guy.” 

McKay is the rare director who’s been able to make political films that (mostly) avoid coming off as self-righteous. An old friend of his from the Second City theater in Chicago, Kelly Leonard, says he’s taken Michael Moore’s place in the conversation. Vice was a more or less accurate presentation of recent history but emotionally heightened and edited into a postmodern fugue of McKay’s political anger. “His body of work has, underneath it, an analysis of power, a social commentary on inequities,” says his friend David Sirota, the Guardian columnist and a former Sanders adviser. “Anchorman is one of the funniest movies ever, but there’s also deep social commentary in there about the media.”

The road to McKay’s latest movie began a decade ago, then McKay read a U.N. report in 2018 outlining the scientific consensus on climate change—and freaked out. “I couldn’t sleep for two nights after I read it,” he says. “I had one of those moments where I went from, ‘Hey, we gotta fucking take care of this, this is crazy,’ to ‘Holy shit. It’s happening now. It’s not 80 years from now, it’s now.’”

McKay first befriended Sirota after reading a story he wrote on NAFTA back in the early 2000s. After Trump was elected, McKay and Sirota began discussing a climate change film that wasn’t about climate change so much as “the rejection of science and facts embedded in the climate discourse,” recalls Sirota. McKay toyed with the idea of a drama—“an epic three-hour movie about these two young people that go on a journey across the country”—but decided the better idea was right in front of him, a metaphor Sirota used in his newspaper columns: Climate change was like a comet headed for earth and nobody seemed to care. “I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the movie,’” says McKay. (Sirota, consequently, is billed as co-producer.)

In 2019, McKay flew to Ireland, where he owns a lake home, and churned out the script “in a furious way that I never had before,” he says. Jennifer Lawrence, who had wanted to work with McKay, signed on to play astronomy postgrad Kate Dibiasky and bids came in from Sony, Universal, and Paramount. But only Netflix, says McKay, agreed to give him the latitude he wanted, especially with the controversial ending. They also dangled enough cash to cast the biggest, most expensive stars in Hollywood (“They are what we call ‘liquid,’” McKay says of Netflix). 

He sent the script to Leonardo DiCaprio, a longtime climate change activist who was looking for a movie with “environmental undertones.” In their first meeting at McKay’s house, DiCaprio asked what kind of tone the film would have and McKay mentioned the 1976 film Network (which “might be my all-time favorite movie”), Dr. Strangelove, and the 1951 Billy Wilder film Ace in the Hole, which starred Kirk Douglas as a cynical reporter who gins up a media circus. Unlike The Big Short or Vice, which were dramas with implied satire (Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld), Don’t Look Up is a full-frontal skewering, though not the slapstick fare he used to make with Ferrell. 

Before DiCaprio signed on, he asked McKay if they could include a speech in the script, something akin to the “I’m mad as hell” scene in Network. “And I was like, ‘Speeches are tricky, man,’” McKay recalls telling him, worried about sounding preachy. “‘It’s like drum solos. They were awesome in the ’70s but...’” 

DiCaprio countered that they could undermine the speech for laughs, and so together they rewrote the speech 15 times. “I think it’s the biggest laugh in the movie when I test screened it,” McKay says. (DiCaprio tells me McKay is one of “the great comedic geniuses of our time.”)

For the role of the president of the United States, McKay crafted a composite of every bad trait of recent vintage, including Bill Clinton, and a double dose of Donald Trump. McKay flipped the gender and set his sights Netflix-coffers high: Oprah Winfrey or Meryl Streep. “I’m like, ‘Meryl Steep’s the greatest film actress in history,’” McKay says. “‘I’ve seen her be funny. Let’s try Meryl. She’ll probably say no.’ And she said yes. And we’re like, ‘Holy shit.’”

Jonah Hill was already a superfan of McKay’s work with Ferrell (his favorite is Step Brothers) and signed on to play Streep’s son and White House chief of staff Jason Orlean, an unmistakable caricature of a coked up Donald Trump Jr. “Adam and I talked a lot about the idea of a bratty kid who grew up with a lot of privilege getting too much power in government,” Hill tells me.

Within a month of production, the pandemic hit and the world went into lockdown, followed by the harrowing presidential election, followed by the January 6 insurrection. The news kept italicizing the message of the movie. “I swear to you, I did not want Don’t Look Up to be this topical,” McKay says. “I had to make it a little crazier. That was the big change. I think reality outflanked us.” (McKay commissioned a podcast about the making of the film, called Last Movie Ever Made, which will come out after the film’s release on Netflix.)

Don’t Look Up offers plenty of comedic knives for Trumpism (the title is the rallying cry of science deniers), but it’s also a brutal send-up of the media. Cate Blanchett’s take on a morning show anchor for a show called The Daily Rip is as close to Mika Brzezinski as one could get without being an impersonation. Even The New York Times comes in for a spanking. 

McKay says any likenesses to actual people and institutions are, as they say, purely coincidental. “I do think tremendous shame on The New York Times for hiring that climate change denier,” he says, referring to columnist Bret Stephens. But he also believes the Times is too beholden to its own vaunted sobriety, treating the alarming reality of rising CO2 like another story in the daily mix instead of the screaming headline McKay believes it should be. Then again, if you’re a top editor at the paper, McKay ventures, “are you really going to go into a meeting and go like, ‘Hey guys, I think we should put a headline that says, ‘We’re fucked.’” 

Perhaps not. Which is why Adam McKay made an entire movie to say that. 

We’re driving through L.A. in a rented Kia, McKay’s long legs folded up in the tiny passenger seat, towel still around his neck, when we spy the Hollywood sign in the distant hills. 

What, I ask, comes to mind when he sees it? 

The opening credits of the sixth season of Laverne & Shirley, he says, when the characters moved to Los Angeles. “Every time I see it, that’s all I think of,” he says. “Me being in second, third grade seeing it and then being like, ‘Why are they going to L.A.?’” (To try and become movie stars, naturally.) 

That was 1980, when McKay was living in Malvern, Pennsylvania, with his mother, following his parents’ divorce. He’d spent his early life in Worcester, Massachusetts, where his bass-player father struggled for work while his mother waitressed and went to night school. For a time they lived on food stamps and got around in a used mail truck. When he was nine, his mother got remarried to a dermatologist and started voting Republican as McKay became obsessed with comedy (Monty Python, Steve Martin), hip-hop (Schoolly D, Public Enemy), and NBA basketball (the Larry Bird–era Celtics). After graduating in 1986, he went to Penn State for a year, disliked the fraternity culture, transferred to Temple University, in Philadelphia, to study American literature, and took up stand-up comedy. “I think my first six times onstage, I bombed, and then I got one laugh, and I remember what the laugh was,” he says. “The first Robocop had just come out and I said, ‘So this is a movie about a fascistic police officer who doesn’t have the emotions of a normal human. So when does the fictional version of this come out?’”

He was feeling like a failed hack when a friend named Rick Roman came back from Chicago and regaled McKay with stories of the improv scene around Second City and its guru Del Close. McKay immediately dropped out of college, sold his comic book collection (two dozen issues of X-Men), bought a used Chrysler New Yorker, glued a lobster claw to the hood, and left town. “We called it the jive bomber, and we drove to Chicago,” he recalls, “and I walked into Improv Olympics at Papa Milano’s and Roman did not lie: There were 120 people jammed in there with this group called Blue Velveeta doing incredible long-form improv that I’d never seen before in my life. I was like, ‘Holy shit.’” (His mother was appalled and offered him money and a new car if he went to law school. “Oh, my God, no,” he said.) 

McKay joined an experimental Second City troupe and later cofounded the Upright Citizens Brigade with Matt Besser, Horatio Sanz, and Ian Roberts. (Roman, who coined the group’s name, drowned in his car during a freak flood in Chicago in 1992; it was McKay who had to identify his body at the morgue.) The original idea for UCB, before it became a multicity institution, was to create scripted pranks and street theater. McKay was reading Artaud, smoking pot, imbibing the avant garde theater of Richard Maxwell, and listening to any band Steve Albini was in. For one stunt, McKay advertised his own suicide by pasting flyers around Chicago featuring his grinning actor’s photo and the tagline “No Joke.” An audience was shepherded outside to see McKay standing on the five-story building across the street. McKay recalls Del Close yelling from below, “Do it for real!” McKay threw down a crash test dummy wearing the same clothes, and an actor dressed as the grim reaper emerged to negotiate his revival, prompting the real Adam McKay to pop out. 

“His material was always super smart and super dumb,” says Kelly Leonard, who took over the Second City in 1992 and ushered in a new vanguard, including Steve Carell and Amy Poehler. “He knew how to make dumb comedy sublime.” 

In 1994, McKay helped produce and perform in a Second City production called “Piñata Full of Bees,” featuring, among other skits, McKay as Noam Chomsky teaching a room full of schoolchildren the real history of America. The show was a success and proved, for McKay, that American audiences were ready for a weirder brand of comedy than had come before. “It turns out some of those people in the suburbs do want the stranger stuff,” he says.

“Piñata” went on to the Kennedy Center and bombed badly, but not before drawing the attention of Saturday Night Live founder Lorne Michaels, who gave McKay an audition. McKay sold himself not as a performer but as a writer. “It was the smartest move I ever made,” he told Charlie Rose in 2010. 

During a party in Chicago to celebrate his new gig, McKay met future wife Shira Piven, a theater director and the sister of actor Jeremy Piven, who comes from a storied Chicago theater family. “Shira got to see me looking as cool as I’m ever going to look, with people toasting me, me giving speeches,” he recalls. “If I was going to meet the woman I’m going to marry, the love of my life, that was the night to do it.”

Piven, it so happened, was moving to New York at the same time, and they began dating. She found McKay funny and charming—and unusually relaxed for an artist of his voracious output and apparent ambition. His favorite word, she said, was “casual.” “Adam McKay is a walking paradox, honestly,” she says. “He always appeared to handle things in stride. Now, whether or not he does do that is another question, but just every different phase of his life, he was like, ‘Oh, okay, this is happening, let’s do this now.’”

McKay was recruited the same week as Will Ferrell, whose SNL audition was Ferrell pretending to yell for his kid to get off the roof of his house. Leonard recalls McKay first telling him of a comedian from L.A. who had a “Peter Sellers quality.” The first skit McKay wrote with Ferrell was the VH1 Storytellers parody in which Ferrell, as Neil Diamond, describes ghoulish stories behind the beloved hits (“Forever in Blue Jeans” was about the time Diamond killed a drifter to get an erection).  

At SNL, McKay felt like a man unleashed. “I remember one time I wrote for 25 straight hours, forgot to eat, got up, got light-headed,” he says. “They had to put limits on the amount of sketches you could write because I could just write all day long.” 

McKay became head writer and began making film shorts for SNL. He remembers the moment he knew he wanted to make movies. His first commercial parody was called “Old Glory Insurance,” an ad for a scam policy for elderly people who fear being attacked by a robot. McKay was shocked when, after drafting the silly script, a car service picked him up and delivered him to a film set where “there’s a perfect 1950s threatening robot with a perfect 82-year-old woman, in perfect wardrobe. It was like, ‘Ding.’” 

After talking with Adam McKay at Hotel Sabatique’s exclusive Cafe and Spa for about 20 minutes, I am sure of only one thing: This is not Adam McKay.  

 Sure, he wears glasses like the writer-director and is relatively tall, but his face is all wrong and his hair is distinctly blond. “You got me, man. My name’s Sean.” 

The man who had previously presented himself as Adam McKay now says, “McKay had some other shit going on.”

We’re driving down Melrose Avenue when we approach the Spanish-style double arches of the Paramount studios lot. It was here, 20 years ago, that Adam McKay and Will Ferrell first pitched a movie idea to a studio executive. It was called August Blowout, about a used car lot. To shape the characters and the setting for the script, McKay and Ferrell had interviewed a bunch of used car salesmen. “We would always ask the guys, ‘Why do you put yourselves in your own TV ads?’” recalls McKay. “One guy wiggled his hand and goes, ‘To get laid.’”

The script was rejected. McKay and Ferrell went back and wrote Anchorman. 

These were the glory days of the partnership, when they were so giddy with jokes they could barely finish a scene without falling into hysterics. “We both just kept laughing because veteran Hollywood craftsmen were having to shoot this scene where [Ferrell, as local TV anchor Ron Burgundy] tells a woman that San Diego means ‘a whale’s vagina,’” recounts McKay. 

As a director, McKay would show up to the set with lists of one-liners and read them through a bullhorn for actors to try out over multiple takes. In Anchorman, Ferrell’s vocal warm-ups before going on air went from throat-clearing noises to wacky, improvised news headlines. “Adam would yell things out, off the top of his head, like, ‘The human torch was denied a bank loan,’” recalled Paul Rudd, who played Burgundy’s best friend. “And Will is good at keeping it together, but I remember that one got him.” (The line ended up in the movie.) 

Anchorman and Anchorman 2 were products of the Bush years, when Ferrell’s straight-faced idiocy was the perfect instrument for McKay’s takes on George W. Bush’s retro masculinity. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the NASCAR comedy starring Ferrell, John C. Reilly, and Amy Adams, doubled as a Rorschach of the country’s political divide during the Iraq War, without ever mentioning the Iraq War. It was probably the funniest movie McKay or Ferrell ever made together, and it earned $163 million. 

Talladega Nights was “the number one movie in the country, biggest opening I’ve ever had,” says McKay. “Michael Moore called it, ‘the most subversive movie of the year.’ And it was everything you would want out of that experience. And in the classic Hollywood fashion, I’m at the lowest point I’ve been at for a while.” 

McKay was depressed.

That’s when he began seeing the Hollywood super therapist Barry Michels, whose “shadow work” involves unorthodox methods of tapping the unconscious, like asking screenwriters to get on their knees before writing and beg the universe for inspiration. In their first session, McKay told Michels he was having a recurring dream in which a bear was chasing him. “It got to the point where the bear was trying to write me [script] notes,” McKay says. “I was getting these crudely written notes from the bear like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

Michels laughed at McKay. “He goes, ‘Are you fucking for real?’ He’s like, ‘Your shadow is screaming for you.’ That was it.”

McKay says he felt a great weight lift off his shoulders. But…what was the bear? 

“The bear was, I was denying my shadow self and my true power because of probably a couple different things, but on the surface of it, it was an embarrassment of this essential tremor, that I get shaky.”

But it wasn’t just the tremor. 

 “There might have been a little part of me that’s like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’” McKay recalls. “‘Are you really doing what you should be doing? Are those little political elements in Talladega Nights really enough?’”

The Bentley that Adam McKay pulls up in sports a personalized license plate reading “OscrWnr.” After giving the valet a hundred dollar bill to “take care of my baby,” McKay turns to me revealing a Democratic Socialists of America T-shirt. 

 “I guarantee no one has ever worn that shirt in that car.” I say, with a light chuckle.

“What exactly is your point?” he says, a distinct vein with a heartbeat now appearing on his forehead. “JUST BECAUSE I HAVE BELIEFS I CAN’T DRIVE A NICE CAR?!!”

As we make our way down Franklin Avenue, we see the L.A. chapter of the Upright Citizens Brigade, around the corner from where he used to live and not far from the offices of Gary Sanchez Productions, the company he and Will Ferrell formed in 2006. It was named for a fictional “Paraguayan entrepreneur and financier” that Ferrell used for his phone ID and became the umbrella company for McKay-Ferrell productions like The Other Guys, The Campaign, and Tammy. 

On the same street is the bungalow that once housed Funny or Die, their web start-up for comedy shorts, the most famous of which was “The Landlord,” starring McKay’s then toddler daughter Pearl as a drunk landlord demanding Ferrell’s rent. The bungalow got so crowded with comedy writers the health department shut them down. So they moved to bigger offices and when that got too small, they moved again. In 2008, McKay, Ferrell, and John C. Reilly made Step Brothers, a slapstick gross-out movie that made $128 million but also seemed to play out the possibilities of what McKay and Ferrell had been doing for a decade. 

After they produced the Broadway show featuring Ferrell as Bush, You’re Welcome America, in 2009, the partnership began to hit, for lack of a better analogy, the Laverne-and-Shirley-go-to-Hollywood phase. McKay was producing more and more movie and TV projects, often without Ferrell, even if Ferrell’s name was on them as an executive producer (like HBO’s Succession, which McKay cast and produces). Ferrell was less interested in producing than in making Will Ferrell comedies. As Ferrell recently told the Hollywood Reporter, he didn’t have the “bandwidth” for producing while McKay wanted a “sphere of influence.”

“The whole time we were doing Gary Sanchez,” says McKay, “I was saying, ‘I don’t care what happens so long as this company doesn’t fuck with our friendship.’” 

In 2015, McKay cowrote and directed his first noncomedy, The Big Short, from a script based on the best-selling Michael Lewis book about the 2008 financial crash. It was also McKay’s first attempt at a more politically direct movie, using voiceovers and postmodern editing to explain and damn the capitalist frenzy that nearly destroyed the world. It featured top-tier dramatic actors (Christian Bale, Brad Pitt) and no Will Ferrell. It grossed $133 million and was nominated for five Oscars, including a win for best adapted screenplay. 

This was necessarily going to bring McKay to a crossroads. But untangling the partnership with Ferrell was going to be complicated. For one, they shared the same manager, Jimmy Miller, who McKay began to see as an impediment to his career. “Everything kept steering back towards, ‘Well, when are you going to work with Will?’” he says. “And then finally I was like, ‘Jimmy, come on. Clearly I’m going in a different direction. Hopefully, it’s no hard feelings.’”

“I’ve learned some lessons,” McKay adds. “It’s always hard feelings.”

McKay dropped Miller in 2015 and began work on Vice, which McKay says was the most difficult creative experience of his life. While struggling to make the movie, he gained 25 pounds and chain-smoked American Spirit Ultra Lights. He also began to lose his sense of humor. “I was so upset and so emotional about the Iraq War, about what we had lived through, about what was happening to our country,” he says. “I went full-on opera. I went, ‘No irony, no cleverness, no sense of humor.’ I just fucking had the funeral. And there were some people that were really moved by it, that were like, ‘We’re with it, yes, I know what you’re doing.’ And then a lot of eyerolls, like, ‘Give me a break.’

 “And so my only regret on that movie,” he says, “is that I forgot to keep a smile. I forgot to keep a little sense of humor throughout it, toward the end.”

McKay was bothered by the mixed reviews, and accusations that he got some facts wrong, even as the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards (it won for best hair and makeup). One afternoon, while working out with his trainer, McKay had a minor heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. “It really did almost kill me,” he says. 

Meanwhile, Will Ferrell was struggling to make a comedy called Holmes & Watson, about Sherlock Holmes, with John C. Reilly as John H. Watson. The movie, a Gary Sanchez Production that was written and directed by Etan Cohen, was in shambles when McKay was brought in to attempt a resuscitation. “I came in and tried to help on the edit on that,” he says, “but that thing was just in rough shape.” (It has a 10 percent Rotten Tomatoes score.) 

That same year, McKay quit Funny or Die after the company took sponsorship from Shell Oil, a move that he had openly called “the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”

McKay and Ferrell discussed breaking up Gary Sanchez Productions at least three times, often on Ferrell’s suggestion. But McKay hesitated, he says, because he was afraid that going through with it would ultimately hurt Ferrell’s feelings. Factions formed inside the company, with McKay’s people at odds with Ferrell’s. In 2019, Ferrell and McKay finally released a joint statement announcing their split, saying, “The two of us will always work together creatively and always be friends. And we recognize we are lucky as hell to end this venture as such.” But it wasn’t exactly true. The last time they talked was a curt phone conversation agreeing to break up. “I said, ‘Well, I mean, we’re splitting up the company,’” recounts McKay. “And he basically was like, ‘Yeah, we are,’ and basically was like, ‘Have a good life.’ And I’m like, ‘Fuck, Ferrell’s never going to talk to me again.’ So it ended not well.”

But that was just the end of their business partnership—the break in the friendship came next. McKay had been making an HBO limited series about the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team in the 1980s based on the book Showtime and Ferrell, a huge Lakers fan, had his heart set on the role of Jerry Buss, the legendary ’80s-era team owner. After Gary Sanchez dissolved, however, the Lakers show moved under McKay’s new production banner, Hyperobject Industries. And Ferrell, it turns out, was never McKay’s first choice. “The truth is, the way the show was always going to be done, it’s hyperrealistic,” he says. “And Ferrell just doesn’t look like Jerry Buss, and he’s not that vibe of a Jerry Buss. And there were some people involved who were like, ‘We love Ferrell, he’s a genius, but we can’t see him doing it.’ It was a bit of a hard discussion.”

The person McKay wanted for Buss was John C. Reilly, who looks more like the real thing, and who is Ferrell’s best friend. McKay hesitated. “Didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” he says flatly. “Wanted to be respectful.”

In the end he cast Reilly in the role anyway—without telling Ferrell first. Ferrell was infuriated. “I should have called him and I didn’t,” says McKay. “And Reilly did, of course, because Reilly, he’s a stand-up guy.” (Will Ferrell declined to comment for the story.) 

Back at McKay’s house, he points to a Step Brothers poster in his living room and shows me his bathroom lined with pictures and posters from Anchorman and other Ferrell productions. McKay says he’s written emails to Ferrell, attempting a rapprochement, but has never heard back. “I fucked up on how I handled that,” McKay laments. “It’s the old thing of keep your side of the street clean. I should have just done everything by the book.” 

 “In my head, I was like, ‘We’ll let all this blow over. Six months to a year, we’ll sit down, we’ll laugh about it and go, It’s all business junk, who gives a shit? We worked together for 25 years. Are we really going to let this go away?’” But Ferrell, he continues, “took it as a way deeper hurt than I ever imagined and I tried to reach out to him, and I reminded him of some slights that were thrown my way that were never apologized for.”

McKay and Ferrell became the thing they most disliked: a Hollywood cliché. “The whole time it was like I was saying it out loud, ‘Let’s not become an episode of Behind the Music. Don’t let it happen.’ And it happened.”

Here perhaps was McKay’s shadow self again. Imagine the bear played by Will Ferrell. “Maybe there was a little shadow in there where I wasn’t able to confront a harsher, darker side of myself, that would ultimately err on the side of making the right casting choice over a lifelong friendship,” McKay ventures. 

He sighs. 

“What are you going to do?”

It wasn’t the end of the world. That was the next movie.

McKay mostly stares at the floor while we talk. Occasionally he moves the egg whites around on his plate with a fork and looks across the dining room as though expecting a friend to enter the restaurant.

Dr. Telmos, on the other hand, never breaks eye contact with me and is engaged to the point of speaking in a constant bark. His cleanly shaved head and piercing eyes place him somewhere between a young Ben Kingsley and UFC head Dana White.

 “Life isn’t just the here and now, it’s also the then and when,” Telmos says, his hot breath hitting me in the face. “Through my 24-hour-a-day work with Adam, and a regimen of 16 different medications, we’ve fused the then, the when, and the now. It’s a truly remarkable achievement.”

McKay starts to speak, but the doctor silences him with a closed fist hand gesture.

“This is really interesting, Doctor…but may I have a little time alone with Adam?” I suggest.

“This interview is over,” Dr. Telmos says and before I know what’s going on, two men in black jumpsuits are ushering the blurry-eyed director of Step Brothers into a tan conversion van.

After I leave L.A., Adam McKay sends me his series of fictional openings, all of them send-ups of himself as an entitled Hollywood prick whose wealth and success have turned him into a hypocrite or a mental patient. It doesn’t take Barry Michels to see they’re versions of Adam McKay that Adam McKay fears he may have already become.

Endings can be messy. McKay even left Barry Michels a couple of years ago. “I was like, ‘I think I’m full of shit now,’” he recalls. “I called myself out: ‘I think now I’m putting on a front.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, you might be.’ I go, ‘I think I’m going to stop seeing you for a little while and just go see another therapist so I can just strip it down again.’”

The ending of McKay’s new movie is also messy. “Some people are going to be very mad about the ending,” he says. “That’s definitely coming.” 

McKay relies heavily on test screenings to edit, sitting in the middle of an audience so he can hear the reaction. For Don’t Look Up, he made the provocative decision to test the movie in conservative Orange County, south of Los Angeles. “I was shocked,” he says. “Like, ‘What’s your political identification?’ ‘Republican.’ ‘What’d you think of the movie?’ ‘Funny as hell.’”

He describes another recent test screening in which a woman became so emotional after seeing Don’t Look Up that she accidentally backed her car into a telephone pole and couldn’t sleep all night, reporting that she was “looking at her whole life in a different way,” he says.

It was a dream response.

McKay is trying to keep his hopes for Don’t Look Up in check. “I made this from a really raw place, and I just have to be okay with whatever happens,” he says. “Who knows?” 

The social satire can be hit-and-miss, but when it hits, which is most of the time, it’s so sharply observed it’s painful to watch. McKay doesn’t even spare his own movie: At one point, a self-satisfied movie star (Chris Evans) promotes a new movie called Total Devastation, about the end of the world, that he hopes will appeal to people of all political persuasions. “That’s why we made Total Devastation,” he says. “It’s a popcorn movie.”

As much as he wants to make a “populist movie,” McKay says he doesn’t believe in the possibility of “consensus movies” anymore. There will never be another Network or Dr. Strangelove, he says. “That’s not the way our society works anymore,” he says. “I didn’t make this for critics. I didn’t make this for my career. I didn’t make this to look cool. I didn’t make this to be hotshot Joe Director.”

If there’s a perch for greatness left in American movies, McKay makes his best bid in Don’t Look Up, which features the most unexpectedly powerful scene McKay has ever made. It’s a dramatic and emotional dinner-table sequence where a family prays together as the comet looms, partly notable for what it can’t help but reference: McKay’s other great dinner-table scene, from Talladega Nights, when John C. Reilly, as the best friend to Will Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby, gives a free-form prayer to “Lord Baby Jesus.” This time, Adam McKay’s American prayer—offered by Timothée Chalamet, who plays a skateboarding street punk—isn’t funny anymore. “There’s no question when I got to that moment, when I was like, ‘He’s got to say a prayer,’ I couldn’t believe it,” McKay says. “It surprised me.”

“Well, I mean, I believe in God,” he says. “I just feel like, at that point, I probably would want that guy at the dinner table with me.” (If you fear this might be spoiling the film, well, it’s about a comet headed directly for earth and therefore somewhat pre-spoiled.) 

A friend of McKay’s suggests the scene captures McKay’s imagined reconciliation with his mother, a religious Trump voter with whom he’s had a rocky relationship in recent years. But McKay says it’s not just his mother—it’s everybody, including Will Ferrell. “That’s my mom,” says McKay. “That’s some other family members. That’s some friends. That’s my friend’s brother.”

In the end, Adam McKay wipes the smile off our collective faces—and his own—to find the film’s emotional core. And it’s a risk that pays off. It’s not funny, but it’s wise. And maybe even…important. 

Or maybe that’s just some bullshit you read about in a personal profile. 

In truth, Adam McKay doesn’t really believe in endings—not even ours. “If I were in a casino and I had to make the bet and look at the odds,” he says. “I would still bet on us solving [the climate crisis].” This would be good news for the upright apes, but also very convenient for Adam McKay’s movie career. Because, climate change be damned, Adam McKay loves making movies and he’s got more coming. At one point, I ask him how he can still get excited about making a basketball series in a world headed for extinction. 

“Come on,” he says. “It’s the Lakers.”

This story has been updated.

CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing of the end of Adam McKay and Will Ferrell's producing partnership. The 2019 announcement of their split came before casting on the forthcoming HBO limited series about the Lakers, not after it. 

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