Actor Gary Cole Takes Us Behind-the-Scenes of ‘Talladega Nights’ & ‘Dodgeball’

Gary Cole has built a career on playing it straight while everyone around him loses it. So when the conversation turned to Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and the amount of improvising that went into it, he was honest about how far outside his comfort zone the assignment sat.

"I had not done a lot of adlibbing in films," Cole told Rich. "You're going to find yourself without a net a little bit in that area."

The net, in this case, was Will Ferrell.

Cole credited Ferrell's skill for making the tightrope feel walkable, but he gave just as much credit to the writing. The character was drawn so well, he said, that he felt confident stepping off the page.

"He's so skilled at it. I felt very confident in doing it because they had written such a great character," Cole said.

He pointed to one sequence in particular. Before Ricky Bobby climbs back into his car and finally drives fast again, chasing down the mojo he had lost, there is a long, unhinged buildup that ends with him driving straight into somebody's house.

"The whole leadup to starting the car, that was all adlib," Cole said, noting that Ferrell worked that way in nearly every scene in the movie.

Then there were Cole's own contributions, the lines he walked in determined to land.

"I went in trying and I said, 'I'm going to do this,'" he said, pointing to the moment his character talks to his mouthy grandchildren.

And then there is "potlicker," the insult that sounds like it was handed down through generations of a fictional family but actually came from a real one.

Cole traced it back to a western he shot in Montana, where he played Custer. The production sent him out with a Wrangler to ride around the state, and the guy had a phrase for everything.

"He would look at elk running and he would go, 'Look at that little potlicker go,'" Cole recalled. "I had no idea what potlicker meant, but it sounded authentic."

That is the whole trick of the performance, really. Cole is not the one improvising a house-sized crash or riffing for ten minutes before an engine turns over. He is the one collecting the odd, true details, a rancher's throwaway line, the way a grandfather talks to kids who mouth off, and delivering them so flatly that they sound invented.

They were not. That is why they worked.