'Very dark and dangerous': Steve Carell as you have never seen him in Foxcatcher

Well, prepare for something completely different – and dark - from the 52-year-old.

Carell stars in Foxcatcher, the highly-rated movie from Bennett Miller which has already picked up the Best Director award in Cannes and is tipped for more awards success.

The film is based on the true story about a pair of champion wrestling brothers and their ultimately tragic relationship with an eccentric multimillionaire.

Though it is a movie featuring sports, this is a long way from a sports movie. For a start, the brothers – Dave and Mark Shultz (Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum) – enter the film as World and Olympic champions already.

But despite his own gold medal, Mark feels stuck in his older brother’s shadow.

Steve Carell’s John du Pont offers Mark the chance to step out on his own and make a lot of money at a state-of-the-art gym, ‘coached’ by du Pont at his Foxcatcher estate.

Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo as Mark and Dave Shultz

The motivation for du Pont is the chance to gain respect from his peers – something he had already tried through ornithology, philately and philanthropy – and from his disapproving mother (played by Greenwich’s Vanessa Redgrave).

Many that came into contact with the super-rich du Pont indulged his delusion that he was ‘coaching’ the team, assuming him – wrongly, as it turns out - to be harmless.

Throughout the film, Carell – almost unrecognisable behind a prosthetic nose - excels in portraying du Pont as an alienated outsider, who inspires sympathy at points with his loneliness and desire to leave a mark on the world.

When he goes on to kill, as director Bennett Miller said, ‘it is something which is shocking but not ultimately surprising’.

This is not what you would have expected from Carell, who played dopey weatherman Brick Tamland in the Anchorman films.

As a press conference at London Film Festival, director Bennett Miller explained his slightly left-field casting.

He said: “What it was about Steve – other than the fact I think he is a great actor and mesmerising to watch and very particular – is that everything I have learned about du Pont suggested that people underestimated what was inside of him.

“I think because of the opportunities Steve had had as an actor opinions had formed about what to expect.

“Early on as we began talking, Steve said ‘I have only ever played characters with mushy centres’.

“Du Pont did not have a mushy centre. He seems to have a mushy centre but in fact there is something very dark and dangerous there.

“I liked the idea that the casting would facilitate similar feeling towards the character that people had towards du Pont, which is some kind of belief that the situation is benign: it’s awkward, it’s weird, it’s creepy but ultimately not dangerous.

“It allows you to justify what you are seeing and why people stayed on the farm as things ratcheted up.”

For Carell, it was more than just playing a monster.

He said: “I don’t think of him as a villain.

“I see him first and foremost as a guy who was the personification of his upbringing and perhaps his mental state. I think I had a little sympathy for him to a certain extent.”

As far as Carell was concerned, the move into a ‘serious’ role away from comedy was not part of a masterplan.

He said: “I personally think of myself as an actor, not just a comedic actor.

“Those are the parts I have been hired to do more often than not. I put my faith in Bennett and thought if he felt I was capable of doing it then I was.”

Foxcatcher is out on January 9, 2015.

See the trailer here: