The Best Comedy Tag Team, Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, are set to make a big splash in the season’s funniest film, The Other Guys. Their first encounter took place in front of hundreds of millions of people. It was the evening of the 2007 Academy Awards, and Ferrell and Jack Black were on stage firing mock insults and threats at the current crop of nominees. Ferrell unloaded on Ryan Gosling: “You’re all hip and now – well I’m going to break you hip…right now!” Black lashed out at Peter O’Toole: “I’m going to beat you down with my Nickelodeon award!” Then Ferrell turned to Wahlberg, a Best Supporting Actor nominee for The Departed, and lost his nerve. “I won’t mess with you,” he said sheepishly. “You’re actually kind of a badass…I hope we’re cool. You are very talented.” Wahlberg smiled and nodded. The audience roared. Agents got ideas. And an unlikely comedy team was born. “The energy of Will and Mark is the oddest mix,” says Adam McKay. “Mark is someone you don’t want to f— with, and it’s always funny to watch Will with someone who really could kick his ass.”

Ferrell and Wahlberg had each flirted with the idea of doing a different buddy-cop film, Cop Out, which was released earlier this year with Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan in the starring roles but McKay felt they should go in what he considered a fresher direction. Rather than simply parody the conventions of Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, and the like, McKay wanted to inject the genre with some ripped-from-the-headlines relevance by making the villain a Bernie Madoff- style Wall Street crook. “Who gives a s— about guys selling drugs at this point? Crime has taken on massive proportions: destroying the Gulf of Mexico, stealing $80 billion. Stealing a billion dollars is nothing now-that’s almost adorable.”

Initially, Ferrell, Mckay, and writer Chris Henchy envisioned Wahlberg’s character as a hard-charging by-the-book cop who’s constantly exasperated by Ferrell’s bumbling, but after the first pass on the script, that approach felt too stale. “The 48 HRS model, where Nick Nolte is saying ‘Let me show you how to do it right’ – that’s been done before.” Says Ferrell, whose Allen Gamble, beneath his mild-mannered exterior, is hiding a dark past. “We figured both characters had to be flawed. In a way, Mark’s character is an even bigger loser than mine, but at the same time, mine is such a weirdo, you almost feel sorry for him to have to put up with my eccentricities.” To flesh out Wahlberg’s Terry Hoitz, a backstory was created in which he accidentally shoots Derek Jeter during game 7 of the World Series, incurring the wrath of the entire city. “I look forward to seeing the audience reaction to that in Boston,” says Wahlberg, a die-hard Red Sox fan. “That’ll be classic.”

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