“This story is Evan’s journey to find who he really is, as opposed to who he’s been posturing to be,” Carell shares. “His campaign promises were about changing the world, but they’re empty. And along the way, he finds that a platitude is one thing, but an actual effort and a self-awareness is something that is only gained through pain, suffering or introspection.”

While Carell is far more serene (and serious as he thoughtfully answers each question without as much as a joke) in person than his larger-than-life comedic personas would seem to indicate, no one will exactly mistake Evan Almighty for a serious film, despite its timely themes. Especially when animals and some rather persistent facial hair are involved.

Becoming Noah

If Michael Scott was asked by God to build an ark, Carell says Jan (from corporate) “would immediately talk him out of it.” But now that Carell’s character in Evan Almighty wants to be a better man, unlike his Scranton, Pennsylvania office counterpart, Evan quickly gets a crash course on channeling Noah in his new Virginia hometown—rough-hewn, silk-burlap robe and scraggly beard included. Becoming Noah wasn’t a quick transformation, though, as it took an average of three hours a day.

“It always looked like something that was actually growing out of my face,” Carell recalls. “So when I lose a little more hair in real life, I will be calling Dave [David Leroy Anderson, who was in charge of creating Carell’s look] to come over to my house every morning and apply a toupee for four hours because I know it’ll look real.”

In addition to donning some serious scruff, Carell also got cozy with a menagerie of animals, (two of each, out of more than 177 species). And while Carell fondly describes the giraffes as having “a very soulful quality to their face that you’d never see from a distance,” he didn’t feel the same way about a certain baboon that happens to bring him a glass of lemonade in the film.

“It [the baboon] really was trained to bring me the lemonade,” Carell recalls. “There was a take before the one they used, where the baboon came up to bring me the lemonade and the other baboon went up and took his lemonade and spilled it. I improvised—unwisely—and said, ‘Hey man, what are you doing?’ I learned that you're not supposed to raise your voice to a baboon. It thought that I was getting aggressive with it, so it bared its teeth, growled at me and went into attack mode. After the take, the trainer came up and said, ‘Yeah, don't do that. Don't look the baboon in the eye.’ They should have told me that before I started the scene. The next time I was like, ‘Ahhh . . . don't kill me!’”

Carell’s on-screen wife Lauren Graham (Gilmore Girls, Because I Said So) adds that working with the animals was one of most surreal aspects of filming. “People will be amazed at how much the animals could really do,” Graham says. “They’re incredibly trained.”