Smart Stars Cracked Up

The stars of Get Smart confessed to cracking each other up during filming. "Oh, it takes editing to cut out all the times I'm laughing hysterically," star Steve Carell told a news conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., last week. "That's the long short of it." Carell plays Maxwell Smart, a newly assigned field agent for the supersecret agency CONTROL. He stars opposite Anne Hathaway as Agent 99 and Alan Arkin as the Chief in the reboot of the classic 1960s spy-spoof TV series.

"I try specifically not to laugh when someone else is doing there thing, because if you laugh and ruin someone else's take, if someone's doing something inspired or incredibly funny, it's a gift, and to take that away by laughing and ruining it, that's a cardinal sin in my mind," Carell said. "But there are some times you just can't help yourself. The scene in the movie, when Alan is trying to pronounce a name [in] the Cone of Silence sequence, ... the scene probably took five times longer than it should have because ... I couldn't control myself. And so I took that gift from Alan Arkin."

Arkin improvised some of the scene, in which he struggles to pronounce the name of an enemy agent, Krstic. "That just killed me," Carell said. Hathaway added: "That was really fun, because I would ... break all the time with Steve, and most of my scenes were with Steve, and so when he finally broke it was such sweet vindication for me." For his part, Arkin said that a shot in which he laughed at Carell actually made it into the movie. "There's a shot where I'm laughing at you [Carell] in the movie," he said. "I was humiliated beyond my wildest hopes." "You were laughing after [I said, 'That's a] sucker punch to the gonads,'" Carell recalled. Director Peter Segal chimed in: "That was an ad lib from Steve. Because we would never have written something so crass."

Get Smart opens August 22. --Patrick Lee, News Editor