Do we like Will Ferrell?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean record on the harm test, visible allyship and a long charity trail, with only one old sketch he now says he wouldn't do again.
Will Ferrell was born in Irvine, California, in 1967 to a keyboardist father who played with the Righteous Brothers and a schoolteacher mother. He studied sports journalism at USC and then took the comedy route, joining the Groundlings improv troupe in Los Angeles. That led to Saturday Night Live from 1995 to 2002.
Then came the run that made him a household name: Old School, Elf, Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Blades of Glory. He also co-founded Funny or Die in 2007 and started The Ron Burgundy Podcast in 2019. He is a bloke who built a career out of playing confident idiots, and mostly punching up.
The harm check is the big one for us, and he does well. Promoting his documentary Will & Harper, he said in an interview with The Independent that “we fear what we don't know”, and suggested that anyone who feels threatened by trans people might not feel confident or safe in themselves. The film follows his road trip across the US with his old SNL writing partner Harper Steele after she came out as trans. We found no anti-LGBTQ+ words from him and no dodgy co-stars or studios in the recent work we read about.
He has also been willing to cop to his own past. In a 2024 New York Times podcast he said that playing Janet Reno in drag on SNL was “something I wouldn't choose to do now”, and joked that he'd blame the writers. That's a small mark rather than a pattern, and he owned it.
On politics he is open about where he stands. In 2024 he fronted a comedic Harris campaign ad urging people to vote and stop Donald Trump returning to the White House. Some Trump supporters said they were done with him, and Fox News framed the ad as him threatening voters. Whether you read it as a harmless joke or a celeb lecture depends on your politics, but nothing in it is harmful.
The rest is the kind of noise you'd expect. The Hawk is a golf comedy with Molly Shannon, Luke Wilson and Chris Parnell, and the creators Ramy Youssef and others reportedly left in 2025 over creative differences. That's a showbiz stoush, not a character one.