Steve Carell still remembers his Massachusetts wedding day perfectly
"I was on the altar and I turned. She was walking down the aisle and I immediately stopped sweating."
It’s been more than 23 years since Acton native Steve Carell and his wife, Nancy Carell, exchanged vows back in August 1995. But the actor remembers their wedding like it was yesterday.
Carell recounted his memories from the stiflingly hot Massachusetts day to US Weekly at the Los Angeles premiere of his upcoming film “Welcome to Marwen” on Monday night.
“We were back east in Massachusetts, and it was over 100 degrees and humid, and the church didn’t have air conditioning and I was sweating bullets,” Carell said. “I’ll never forget it. I was on the altar and I turned. She was walking down the aisle and I immediately stopped sweating.
“I was full of this sense of calm because I knew that person was going to be my partner and have my back and I’d have hers,” Carell continued. “It was literally feeling empowered. It was feeling like I was more powerful because she was a part of my life.”
In “Welcome to Marwen,” one of several films Carell appears in this season, the actor plays a real-life artist named Mark Hogancamp who was brutally beaten outside of a bar in 2000. After awakening from a nine-day coma, Hogancamp coped with the trauma of the incident by building an elaborate model of a World War II village he called Marwencol (shortened to Marwen in the film), populated by doll versions of people he knows in real life.
One of the early working titles for the film was “The Women of Marwen,” and according to Carell, the women in Hogancamp’s life (played in the film by Leslie Mann, Janelle Monae, and others) are deeply important to Hogancamp.
“He trusts women implicitly, and they are the most important people in his life,” Carell told US Weekly. “There’s a responsibility, especially when you’re playing a real-life person, because you want to try to get it as close to right as you can. It’s never going to be completely accurate. And the fact that Mark and I have become friends, it was an added responsibility on top of that, because I felt like I owed it to him. In depicting him, I just tried to think about what a generous spirit he has, and how kind he is to others, and how lacking in cynicism he is.”
