TIFF 2014: How 'Office' star Steve Carell went from very funny to very serious for 'Foxcatcher'

Michael Scott is not joking around anymore. The dunder-headed Dunder-Mifflin head has put aside his humour for TIFF – and he might even get an Oscar for it.

Actor Steve Carell, who is best known for starring as Michael Scott in “The Office” from 2005 to 2011, has shocked his fans this year in Toronto by seriously playing against type in “Foxcatcher.” In the film, Carell stars as millionaire John du Pont, who was convicted of murdering Olympic wrestler David Schultz in 1997.

“Very rarely did I look like myself during those months,” Carell told The Wall Street Journal last week. “It was off-putting to people.”

But if you look closely at the 52-year-old actor’s career, he has been moving in the a more dramatic direction for some time. Here’s how the man who was once nominated as America’s funniest man could win an Oscar for not being funny at all.

Very Funny

Carell’s roots are in comedy. He started out in The Second City comedy troupe in Chicago which led to a role on the sketch comedy series “The Dana Carvey Show.” He then became a correspondent for “The Daily Show,” which lasted from 1999 until 2005, the year he landed his most famous role to date, that of Michael Scott in “The Office.” After starring as the eponymous “40-Year-old Virgin” in 2005 in his first major big screen role, “The Office” became more recognized and Carell won a Golden Globe for his TV role in 2006.

Five years later, the actor left the show to focus on his film career, where he had already acted in supporting roles in major comedies like “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” and “Bewitched.” He became a well-heeled big screen comedy star in his own right starting in 2007 with “Evan Almighty” and followed by “Get Smart,” “Date Night,” “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” and “Despicable Me.”

Funny-Serious

A year after he joined “The Office,” Carell started dipping his toes into indie comedies, in which he was able to show his range – that he could be funny and serious at the same time. In the 2006 hit “Little Miss Sunshine,” he plays the central character’s gay uncle Frank, a Proust scholar who is living back home after attempting to commit suicide. A year later, he was playing another bittersweet role in an indie comedy, this time as the central character in “Dan in Real Life.” He plays a widower and newspaper advice columnist who falls for his brother’s girlfriend.

Carell’s most high-profile comedy-drama arrived in 2011 with “Crazy, Stupid, Love.” In the film he plays a middle-aged man who discovers his wife was cheating on him and, back on the dating scene, seeks advice from a womanizer (Ryan Gosling).

“I thought the story was very real, and very human, and funny at the same time,” Carell told Collider that year. “And that’s a fine line to walk when you want something to be both funny and dramatic at times. And those are the things that appealed to me the most.”

Very Serious

Last year, Carell softened the blow of his first super serious role by doing it in a comedy. In “The Way Way Back,” he plays the emotionally-abusive boyfriend of the 14-year-old central character’s mother. He was nominated among the rest of the cast at for the Phoenix Film Critics Society Award for Best Acting Ensemble, establishing himself as perfectly capable not only of playing the straight man – but an unlikeable one. Though, according to “Foxcatcher” writer-director Bennett Miller, that didn’t land him the role of convicted murder John du Pont.

In the TIFF film, Carell, with a prosthetic nose and bleached eyebrows, plays schizophrenic billionaire John du Pont, whose relationship with Olympic wrestlers Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) and his brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), ended with du Pont killing Dave, landing du Pont in prison until he died in 2010.

“What Steve does doesn’t resemble anything he’s done before and is far outside his comfort zone,” director Bennett Miller said at Cannes in May. “I truthfully hadn’t any material evidence that this was something he could do, but we chatted about it, and I heard how he thought about the character, and I had a vision of it working. I thought, ‘He can do it and he can commit himself, and it might hurt, but he will get there.’ ”

Miller asked Carell to drop his sense of humour entirely, and the actor got into character by watching footage of du Pont. “It’s difficult to say exactly what motivated him and what demons he had lurking inside of him,“ Carell said of du Pont at Cannes, adding, “You can do all sorts of research and listen to someone’s voice and watch them but I think ultimately you forget all about that when you start to shoot. If you’ve rehearsed enough, it’s inside of you when you’re doing it.”