One of the best scenes in Talladega Nights.
If you’ve ever watched 2006 film Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, then you probably know there are several legendary lines to come from that script.
The movie starred Will Ferrell alongside other great actors in John C. Reilly, Sacha Baron Cohen, Leslie Bibb, Jane Lynch and Amy Adams, and it also featured a cameo from Dale Earnhardt Jr., who seemed to enjoy appearing in the film and the movie in general.
While it was obviously a comedy that very much poked fun at the sport and its fans, during an appearance on the ALL THE SMOKE podcast, Ferrell talked about how they were able to thread the needle, so to speak, in terms of making it funny and appealing to people who weren’t NASCAR fans or didn’t know anything about the sport, while also doing the same thing to people who were huge NASCAR fans.
It’s rare in that I think anyone can have a laugh watching it, and most fans of the movie will probably tell you that the best scene happens when the family is gathered around the kitchen table to a gourmet meal of Domino’s, KFC, and Taco Bell. Ferrell’s character prays to “baby Jesus,” and that’s a whole thing, but after he’s done saying grace, his kids Walker and Texas Ranger jump into the conversation after their grandpa, Chip, remarks at how bad and misbehaved they are.
They’re horrible kids, but that gets worked out later in the movie (I won’t reveal an spoilers), but they hurl some wild insults at their grandpa, and Texas Ranger famously says:
“Chip, I’m gonna come at you like a spider monkey! Chip, I’m all jacked up on Mountain Dew!”
It’s a great scene, and during the aforementioned interview, Ferrell revealed that the camera man was laughing so hard during that scene that he couldn’t stop shaking the camera, and he kept apologizing to everyone because of it:
“I know that in ‘Talladega Nights,’ when we’re doing the baby Jesus scene, and then we’re having a debate about… and the kids were like making fun of the grandfather, like, ‘I’ll come out you, Chip, like a spider money,’ we kept feeding them lines.
That’s where the camera guy, he was laughing, he was shaking so hard. He kept apologizing, he’s like, ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t stop laughing.'”
Who could blame him… it’s one of the best, most memorable scenes in the whole movie that I hear people quote all the time to this day.
The kids were hilarious, very talented actors, and actually, the one who played Texas Ranger is now working in country music. Grayson Russell, who played Texas, now tours with up-and-coming viral success Elizabeth Nichols as her guitarist, which the crowds always love, as you can imagine.
To have been a fly on the wall while filming this scene, honestly… I’m sure there was a lot more where it all came from that they had to leave on the cutting room floor, and even if the camera guy was laughing, the camera work in the final cut doesn’t show it:
@demarcus.cousins85 Talladega Nights_ Baby Jesus Scene Bloopers!#fypシ #willferrel #comedy #podcast #blooper ♬ original sound – demarcus cousins
If you’ve never seen the movie before, this probably won’t be as funny, but if you have… it’s always good for a laugh or two even if you’ve seen it a million times:
The full podcast with Ferrell is available below.
