Will Ferrell wasn’t proud of his birth name when he was a kid.
“This is a minor thing in terms of — it’s not really even trauma — but I remember feeling so embarrassed because my real name is John, John William Ferrell, so [the] first day of school, I’d be John,” Ferrell, 56, said on the Tuesday, July 9 episode of Christina Applegate and Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s “MeSsy” podcast.
He added, “The teacher would be like ‘John Ferrell?’ and it was so embarrassing to me to have to say ‘Here, but I go by Will, I don’t go by John.’”
“I don’t know why it was so embarrassing to me to have to explain, ‘I’m actually Will,'” he noted.
“People are probably going to be listening to this going ‘That is the lamest thing ever,’ ” Ferrell quipped, to which Applegate responded: “We just lost anyone named John.”
The Despicable Me 4 star went on to comment on another “issue” as a kid — his “straight blond hair” which “got curlier and curlier.”
“So in fourth grade I would’ve had a part, like, a wavy part,” he recalled. “By the time I left elementary school, the first day of junior high was very traumatic because I just had to go full ‘fro. I couldn’t comb it anymore.”
Ferrell went on to say the “fourth grade Will would’ve been really into sports, very conscientious student,” adding, “But at an early age, [I was] still trying to make my friends laugh.”
“I was like a conscientious class clown,” he said. “I would goof around to a point. If the teacher said ‘Please stop,’ I was like, ‘You got it.’”
Ferrell, who appeared on the episode to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, costarred in the film with Applegate, 52, which became a smash-hit.
The duo were a dysfunctional on-air couple in the 2004 film, with Ferrell playing anchorman Ron Burgundy and Applegate portraying Veronica Corningstone, a toxic anchorwoman and Burgundy’s on-and-off girlfriend.
“At the end of the day, Christina just checked all the boxes,” Ferrell said of casting Applegate in Anchorman, noting that she was “funny, smart, tough,” allowing her character “to stand up to these doofuses, and she was the smartest person in the room.”
