Judd Apatow Was Never ‘Competitive’ as a Comedian: ‘I’m Not Going to Be Jim Carrey’

Judd Apatow has always preferred to be a behind-the-scenes comedic creative.

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The mega-producer and director said during Kevin Hart’s talk show “Hart to Heart,” airing July 17 on Peacock, that he always uplifted his more well-established comedian pals while starting out in Hollywood.

“When you’re young, you don’t feel like you’re the successful person. You’re just trying to break in,” Apatow said. “You believe in your friends, like, ‘Oh my gosh, my friend is the funniest person ever.’ […] So when I started, I lived with [Adam] Sandler for a while. Rob Schneider lived across the street. David Spade lived down the street. I would drive over the hill to Jim Carrey’s house to help him with stuff: jokes, sketches, for ‘In Living Color.’ And I was one person that was like, ‘I’ll help you write your jokes.'”

Apatow continued, “Everyone wants to be a star, so no one wanted to write jokes for anybody else. I thought, I needed to pay my rent so if I can get a comedian to give me $50 a joke to help, that’s the best job in the world. Not many comedians wanted to do that.”

Apatow came to that realization soon in his career: instead of trying to compete with legendary comics, he could be a supportive collaborator.

“I always thought, ‘Well, I’m not going to be Jim Carrey, but I can’t believe I get to sit with Jim Carrey and help him,'” Apatow said. “I wasn’t competitive with everyone because I think in my gut…We all love Bill Murray, we all love Eddie Murphy. I think the idea in my own head, ‘Oh, I’m going to be like them,’ disappeared very quickly.”

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And Apatow still employs that philosophy in his professional life.

“I still feel like one of those people who is trying to break in . I always feel like that’s the space that I’m in,” he said. “I want to stay in that space where everyone I believe in hasn’t made it yet.”

Frequent collaborator Will Ferrell recently recalled Apatow helping rewrite the “Anchorman” ending after poor test screenings.

“So here’s an interesting thing about ‘Anchorman.’ We put the movie together, we do our first test screening. You test screen your movie and it’s a score from zero to 100. We were like, ‘That seemed to play pretty great.’ We get the score back; it’s a 50. Not good. It’s not good,” Ferrell said during co-star Christina Applegate’s “Messy” podcast , co-hosted by Jamie-Lynn Sigler. “And that can either go one way or the other. There’s a panic button that’s hit, or, luckily, the studio was like, ‘Let’s figure it out.’ They gave us a budget for reshoots. Judd [Apatow] really helped to be a steady hand in that regard. And so all of that, the whole pandas and the bears and all that, that’s five days of a re-shoot. An entirely new ending was shot.”