| Neo Demons |
There’s Something About Mary
As the gross-out comedy landmark turns 25, the Farrelly brothers reflect on the hits and misses of a box-office smash that smuggled a lot of heart in amid the filth and fluids.
TOTAL FILM RETROSPECTIVE
Ah, young love… a time of first dates, awkwardness and violently getting your junk stuck in your zipper and having to rely on the fire department to help pry yourself free. Odds are, you can relate to at least the first two things on this list. The third may be best remembered by Ted Stroehmann (Ben Stiller), the bumbling teen looking for love in the opening moments of 1998’s raucous comedy There’s Something About Mary.
Directed by sibling duo Peter and Bobby Farrelly, this sleeper hit found adult Ted still obsessed with his estranged teenage crush Mary (Cameron Diaz). Keen for a second shot at love, he hires sleazy private detective Pat Healy (Matt Dillon) to track her down, only for the PI to fall head-over-heels for her, too. What follows is a chain reaction as everyone who comes into contact with Mary quickly becomes obsessed, causing even more chaos for poor old Ted.
‘We were just doing what we thought was funny,’ Bobby tells Buff. ‘Pete and I were thinking about our own lives and that was something we were always amused by – trying to chase girls that were out of your league and aiming higher than you might get. That’s what Mary was,’ he says. ‘She was kind of the perfect woman – almost a caricature. She was the person that the average idiot guy would do backflips over and anything for, including screwing each other over. We were amused by the absurdity of it.’
After the mammoth success of 1994’s Dumb and Dumber, the Farrellys returned with Kingpin in 1996, a bowling comedy that flopped on release but later gained cult status. For their third film, the pair threw everything at the wall to prove their comedy chops. ‘We knew we were getting to the point where we really couldn’t pull up short,’ remembers Peter. ‘We were going to have to go for an R-rated comedy if we wanted to really do what we wanted to do. Once we decided that, we just kept going and got a hard R.’ That they did. From the aforementioned zipper debacle to thinking up a – shall we say – handy substitute for Mary’s now-infamous hair-gel scene, the Farrellys pushed their gags to the limit, creating a word-of-mouth success and birthing a new wave of gross-out copycats in the process. ‘We were lucky when it came out because the timing was great,’ adds Peter. ‘Nobody was pushing the envelope – and that made it harder to get out by the way because the studio was like, “Are you crazy? You can’t do this. It’s nuts!” It took us a while to convince them.’
Were they worried their more risqué stuff might not land? ‘We weren’t nearly as nervous as Cameron was,’ says Bobby, discussing the scene where Mary mistakes Ted’s jizz for hair gel. ‘So we said to her, “Listen, we’ll film it and if it doesn’t work, we’ll just take it right out.”’ Peter agrees that the whole thing was a big swing – but one that ultimately paid off. ‘It could’ve been the moment where everyone in the audience says, “This is disgusting. What are we watching?”’ he admits. ‘Cameron was at the first test screening. I remember afterwards she came up to us and said, “Home run, love it, keep it in.”’
Like many early noughties comedies, not everything in There’s Something About Mary has aged perfectly. Despite including roles for intellectually disabled actors in many of their movies – including Dumb and Dumber and Bobby’s 2023 comedy Champions – by casting non-intellectually disabled actor W. Earl Brown as Mary’s brother Warren, both agree they missed the mark.
‘Hollywood has changed and we have, too,’ reasons Bobby. ‘We put a guy in there playing that role who didn’t have intellectual disabilities. Nowadays we would never consider letting someone play that part if they didn’t have them. There are people with intellectual disabilities who want to be actors so if a character in the script has intellectual disabilities, let’s find someone with disabilities to play that role.’
Peter echoes the sentiment: ‘It didn’t even occur to us and it should have. We’ve learned a lot since.’ He’s also well aware of the unfortunate connection between Mary’s masquerading admirers and catfishing. ‘I never thought of it as catfishing but it’s definitely a light-hearted version of stalking,’ he says.
However, underneath it all, the Farrellys try to imbue their out-there characters and even more out-there jokes with a heart that they hope helps audiences come along for the ride. ‘We’ve never wanted to hurt anyone in any way,’ says Bobby. ‘We don’t want anybody to be offended and we never felt like we were laughing at someone’s expense. We were laughing at the foibles of being human – and we can all laugh at ourselves.’
‘Hollywood has changed and we have, too’
Peter hopes this sentiment remains visible in the film’s lasting legacy. ‘Ben Stiller plays a goofy-looking guy who can’t get a date and gets picked on by his own friends. Yet when he sees an intellectually disabled guy being bullied, he steps up,’ he says. ‘It’s not hard to fall in love with Cameron Diaz but when he hears her life has gone to pieces, he still wants to meet her. That’s true love and you root for that.’
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY IS STREAMING ON DISNEY+ AND IS AVAILABLE ON DIGITAL HD, DVD AND BLU-RAY.