In a new interview with Paste magazine, Anchorman director/co-writer Adam McKay revealed that he and Will Ferrell tried to get a bunch of super lofty cameos for Anchorman 2’s big news anchor brawl, including Oprah Winfrey and presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Here’s McKay explaining what happened:
We drew up a wish list of all the people we wanted and what we ended up with was basically our wish list. It has never happened before. Usually you do your dream casting and you get 30 or 40 percent of the people. In this case they all said, “Yes.†It was insane. When they started saying, “Yes,†I said, “Wait a minute, shall we try crazier ones?†So we actually tried Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was immediate quick decisive, “No.†Oprah Winfrey’s person was like, “You never know…†There was like an hour where we were like, “She might do this!†Then we got a call saying, “No, she’s not doing it!†Then the Barack Obama one was crazy. We actually had a semi-connection to the White House. The connection said he might do it if he gets to say something with a point of view. The joke was going to be he was from C-SPAN, and he was going to say this thing about how C-SPAN is going to change news because it’ll be stripped down. It will just be the truth and you’ll see, someday everyone will be watching C-SPAN—that was going to be the joke. Then of course someone underneath him was like, “Are you fucking crazy? No he won’t do it. He’s the President.â€