Steve Carell talks John du Pont and 'Foxcatcher'

BACK WHEN Steve Carell was playing Brick Tamland in "Anchorman," he probably didn't anticipate a day when he'd be on "60 Minutes," discussing his Oscar chances.

But there he was a week ago, fielding questions about his widely praised role in "Foxcatcher" as millionaire Main Line murderer John du Pont, easily the strangest role of Carell's admirably weird career.

Carell, behind a big fake nose, gives a performance of hair-raising detachment, moving a "60 Minutes" correspondent to ask the actor why, given his commercial success, he'd take a "chance" on a role like this.

I told Carell I thought it was an irksome question to ask a guy who'd played a 40-year-old virgin who gets his chest waxed, a weatherman who kills a guy with a trident, a guy who makes dioramas out of dead mice (in case you'd forgotten about "Dinner for Shmucks").

"I very much appreciate you being offended on my behalf, but it doesn't really register with me," said Carell, laughing. "I've tried to do different things. I don't think I've taken any jobs based on how I want people to perceive me. If people think of me as a comedic actor, that's fine, if they don't that's fine, too. I don't worry about that stuff.

"I'm not a matinee idol. I'm a character actor. So I figure that's what I should be doing, taking different roles, playing different kinds of characters. "

You don't get much more different that du Pont, notorious strange-o who in 1996, after constructing an Olympic training facility on his Main Line estate, suddenly and inexplicably murdered coach/wrestler Dave Schultz.

Du Pont had a lot of eccentricities, some dangerous (he rode around in a tank) - sorting through them to find a character must have been daunting. How did Carell arrive at the du Pont he plays in the movie?

"I did a lot of research, and watched a lot of tape on him. I thought it was important. He had a very specific look and a specific way of speaking that was very particular to him. And I thought his appearance was a great part of how people responded to him. He was off-putting," Carell said.

"At the same time, as I studied how he moves and how he speaks, I was learning about how he grew up, in this isolated life. Though he was an extremely wealthy person, his parents split up when he was 2, and he grew up in this massive house with a mother who by all accounts was a chilly woman. All of those things contributed to how I approached the role."

So, on set, he walked around, kept to himself, staring at everyone along the ridge of his big, creepy nose.

"I didn't socialize with Mark [Ruffalo] and Channing [Tatum] too much. When I wasn't doing a scene, I stayed apart from those guys. I tended to lurk in the shadows of the set," said Carell, who after a time began to unnerve himself.

What the heck, he wondered, had he gotten himself into?

"One of the few times I actually spoke with Mark, after a day of shooting, we talked about how we we're both a little worried. I mean, we didn't know how any of this was going to play out, and we both felt we'd put ourselves way out on a limb. We agreed that either it was going to work, and [director] Bennett [Miller] knew what he was doing, or it was going to be very weird," Carell said.

Carell is used to going out on a limb. He started in improv comedy, did some work for Second City in Chicago, which led to voiceovers for "SNL" - he and Stephen Colbert did the voices for a cartoon segment called "The Ambiguously Gay Duo."

I asked Carell if "Foxcatcher," which presents him as a deeply repressed man, is his second ambiguously gay character.

"The movie holds back from getting specific about those things," Carell said. "I have my own ideas, but I prefer to keep those things to myself."

Whoever du Pont was, he said, he was a complex individual, and he felt duty bound to suggest a man who was more than simplistically evil.

"I honestly didn't approach him as a villain. I just thought of him as a tortured, lonely guy."