Ed Helms had come a long way to land his leading role in “The Hangover,” the R-rated 2009 comedy littered with crass sexual jokes and expletives, and thus proudly took one of his biggest fans to the premiere — his “socially conservative” mother.
The actor sat down on Ted Danson’s podcast “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” this week and said his mom had already seen him do some “crazy stuff” on “The Office” and as a “Daily Show” correspondent, but that he wasn’t sure if she was ready for “The Hangover.”
“I grew up in a kind of a repressed Southern home,” he said. “Politically very progressive, but still a very socially conservative kind of environment. And so, ‘The Hangover’ is nuts. Like, that’s not what they raised me to do, is to be in a movie like ‘The Hangover.’”
The Todd Phillips comedy starred Helms, Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis as a hungover trio of groomsmen desperately combing Las Vegas for their friend ahead of his wedding. It featured racial slurs, full-frontal nudity and a whole lot of cussing.
Helms had already established himself as a reliable comedic talent at that point: He regularly delivered hilarious interview segments for “The Daily Show” from 2002 to 2006, only to jump aboard one of America’s most beloved TV comedies in NBC’s “The Office.”
The actor told Danson that, as a result, “there was some sort of acceptance already” from his parents about his career. But Helms said that, at age 35, he was still “nervous” for them to see “The Hangover” at its Los Angeles premiere.
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“And the movie ends, and there’s huge applause, and I’m looking at my mom,” he told Danson. “The lights come up, and she’s crying. She has like, tears streaming down her face, and for a second, I’m like, ‘Did I just break my poor mom’s heart?’”
“She says to me, ‘That was so funny,’ and just [gives me] a big hug,” Helms recalled.
“The Hangover” ultimately went on to become a global phenomenon: It earned nearly $470 million worldwide, spawned two sequels — and became one of the highest-grossing R-rated comedies of all time.
For Helms, however, his mom’s support was the biggest win.
“I’ll just never forget, that was such a kind of, like, special moment,” he told Danson. “‘The Hangover’ was such a pivotal moment in my career, in my life, and for Mom to just be all in on it, it meant so much.”
