Will Ferrell Has No Plans to Crash Rihanna's Halftime Show. (Yet.)

Please allow me to add one item to your things-you've-been-taking-for-granted list, well above the advent of penicillin, but somewhere below deodorant, "Landslide," and German Shepards: Will Ferrell. The man has been making you laugh, often uncontrollably, for nearly 30 years. Applebee's, bunk beds, "Love Me Sexy," cowbell, you're my boy, blue—all of them.

So please, when Ferrell shows up on your screen for approximately 60 seconds on Sunday during The Big Game, I humbly ask that you enjoy the heck out of it. Ferrell partnered with GM and Netflix to showcase the former's goal to convert to all-electric vehicles by 2035. The product of their labor? A delightful Super Bowl commercial that imagines Ferrell in your favorite Netflix jams. The spot includes, but certainly is not limited to: Ferrell going full Dusty Bun in Stranger Things, dressing in his regency-era best a la Bridgerton, and passing out in the creepy Squid Game van.

To celebrate the occasion, we hopped on the phone with the 55-year-old for a little catch-up. And yes, he's just as full of cheer as when he ran onto a stage at 30 Rock.

ESQUIRE: Thank you for taking the time, Will. I’ve been looking forward to this.

WILL FERRELL: I hope I don't totally let you down. Be prepared for that.

In the commercial, of all the shows we see you in—Bridgerton, Stranger Things, and Squid Game—which one could you actually see yourself starring in?

Oh, probably Squid Game. I remember watching it, going, Oh, that could be me. Back against the wall. No place to go in life, under a mountain of debt, waiting for some nondescript van to pick me up to take me to this place. What was so fun about that was trying to figure out how to survive those games. Would you have the intellectual capacity and the kind of fortitude to figure out those little tasks? I don't know how long I would survive. I'll say that.

You would've made a good Stranger Things parent, like a Mike’s-dad type.

That would've been good too. I do love that era's fashion. So I'd fit in.

You're very much an all-timer in the Super Bowl commercial canon, mostly because of that one Old Milwaukee ad, where you just march through a cornfield and burst open a beer at the end.

It's so funny because they had come to us saying, "Look, we're getting rid of the brand. We're basically shelving Old Milwaukee. We want to just make a last-ditch effort to see if there's any life left here. We'll give you guys full creative control and you guys can just shoot whatever spots you want to shoot." It was for very little money. We just did this guerilla-style road trip through Iowa and Indiana and shot probably 15 to 20 different spots.

And that was the one that we just pulled over in a cornfield in—on our way to maybe Milwaukee, Indiana or somewhere in Iowa. We found the cheapest [TV] market in the country, in Nebraska. You could buy a spot for $800. They aired it, and then took it and put it on YouTube immediately. Anyway, at the end of the day, it garnered [so much attention that] it was equivalent to buying a regular spot at $3 million, or $5 million.

You could run that commercial today and it’d be just as funny, but that would never happen because of how baby and celebrity-forward these ads are now.

Probably not. But it was great. Like Adweek and all these things picked up on it. And yet there's still tons of people who've never seen that. But when I bring up this Old Milwaukee ad, I'm like, "You got to look this up." And people are like, "What?"

Where's your football fandom nowadays?

Gosh, that's a great question, because I grew up a Rams fan and then they broke my heart when they left LA. Then they came back and I thought, Oh, this could be great. And I just never liked them the same. I got to know Pete Carroll, the Seahawks coach. Got to know him when he was down here doing USC football—and my boys and I became Seahawks fans.

So, obviously, our team is not in the Super Bowl, but this is an interesting game. Philadelphia's had a great year. Mahomes is a warrior out there, but I feel somewhat ambivalent. Just hoping for a good game.

Since you’re known for crashing random sports events, I just want to make sure you're not going to surprise Rihanna and show up on stage midway through “Umbrella.”

If there was a way to? Trust me. In fact, you've given me this idea way too late. I wish. No, actually, I will be in Liverpool of all places, with a bunch of buddies. We're going on a four-game, six-day trip just watching a bunch of soccer. On Super Bowl night, we'll be searching for a pub at 11 P.M. and I will be furiously eating fish and chips wondering why I'm not on stage with Rihanna, thanks to you.

I'm sorry for that, Will. You know, one thing that came up in my prep for this: I had no idea that you studied sports journalism in college.

That was my initial plan. Obviously, I really loved comedy and it was something that I chose to indulge. But at the time, going into college and everything, I thought, Oh, I always played a bunch of sports and loved sports. Well, maybe I'll be a talking head on ESPN. Those guys have a lot of fun and there's some entertainment value there. So that was what I thought I was going to try to do. Of course, the comedy itch was too big and I had to scratch it.

In an alternate universe, I could see you having success in the Vin-Scully-meets-Harry-Caray vein.

I remember there was a sportscasting class. And you could literally go and take a tape recorder, sit up in the bleachers of the basketball game, and do play-by-play by yourself. God, I wish I had some of those tapes. I just remember listening back to my play-by-play skills and they were absolutely terrible. I could not keep up with the pace of play. I know you build up to that. But you're listening to an announcer effortlessly call out every single player on both teams—and you know that they don't have enough time to search for their notes. It's just all off the top of their head. That's a skill that I don't think I ever would've gotten.

I want to make sure you have a minute to talk about the GM partnership, because it did give us the image of a truck backing you in a Bridgerton promenade.

That was such a positive experience and really, really fun creatively. And then when they reached out about this partnership with Netflix, it was another cool concept creatively, but also just a fun thing to get behind as well—seeing that Netflix is trying to obviously use GM EVs whenever it's applicable. Which is the fun of the commercial, that we have [used them] even when some shows obviously make no sense, and others they'll start to try to do that. I love the message. It's all these little micro-movements that we're all going to have to try to take part in to help solve climate change.

Can we ever hope for another sports comedy from you?

I've actually got one that I'm trying to develop right now that I'll... Unfortunately, I can't give much detail on it. But it could be good. There's something that I've been following that I think is a really fun area of a specific sport to comment on. I'm trying to figure out exactly what that is story-wise, character-wise, and this and that.

That's a brutal tease.

I told you I was going to let you down.

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