The Steve Young, Not Favre, Story

Peter Farrelly walked through the casting history of the quarterback cameo in There's Something About Mary, and the list is longer than most fans know.

The scene where Mary tells Ted she wants to go watch SportsCenter hit ESPN's newsroom like a jolt. Rich remembers it. He was two years into his seven-year SportsCenter run in 1998, and the line put the show on a different cultural tier. Farrelly said that was the idea. The Farrellys were building the perfect woman, and part of that perfection was wanting to watch SportsCenter.

The knock-on effect for Rich: a false sense of self. Single at the time, he kept getting drinks sent over at bars and kept looking around for Cameron Diaz. It was usually a 500-pound dude trying to chat him up. He jokes that SportsCenter guys were the Led Zeppelin of their moment.

Then Farrelly got to the quarterback. First choice for the cameo: Steve Young. They sent him the script. Young called, said it was hysterical, and passed. His reason was clean. He was Mormon, he knew kids would sneak into the theaters to see him, and he did not want that on his conscience.

Choice two: Drew Bledsoe. The Patriots quarterback wanted to do it. Then came the mosh pit incident. Bledsoe jumped into a mosh pit at a Boston club, somebody got hurt, the town was furious, and Bledsoe told the Farrellys he could not leave to shoot a movie without getting run out of New England.

That led them to Brett Favre. The bit where Ben Stiller mispronounces Favre was an ad-lib from Stiller on the day. Farrelly loved it.

From there, Farrelly rolled into a Sacha Baron Cohen appreciation. Cohen plays a character in the movie and essentially threw out the script. He pulled a Bill Murray from Kingpin, rewrote his lines on the fly, and the reactions from Mark and Paul Walter Hauser on camera are first-hearings. Farrelly had to set up cross-cameras to catch both sides because nobody knew what Cohen was going to say.

His director philosophy when working with that caliber of improviser: do not yell cut, stay out of their way, let them do what they want.

Three of the best quarterbacks of their generation were in the mix for that role. Only one could take it. And the tag, Brett, still lands.