Will’s ‘Strategery’

Because the 2000 presidential campaign strayed into theater of the absurd, Will Ferrell is leaving “Saturday Night Live” known most prominently as “the guy who impersonates Bush.”

Being widely admired for your impression of a sitting president isn’t a terrible fate, but after seven seasons on “SNL,” the 35-year-old Ferrell segues now into a career that will presumably involve trying to become big at the movies--and in comedies, that most hit-or-miss of genres.

Ferrell lives in the Hollywood Hills but has been keeping an apartment in New York for the purposes of his regular job. He is leaving “SNL” for reasons you might expect, including the sense that, after seven years, it is time.

“It’s kind of like dog years,” he said of his career on the show, which began in 1995, when Ferrell was plucked from the L.A. sketch comedy troupe the Groundlings by “SNL” founder and executive producer Lorne Michaels.

In leaving, Ferrell said he uses an analogy that Michaels hated hearing: He didn’t want to become that guy who’s already graduated from high school but still hangs out in his van in the parking lot, picking up seniors.

Will he be the next Bill Murray or Dana Carvey? There is no predicting this, really (why did it happen for Rob Schneider but never for the late Phil Hartman?), but three upcoming at-bats may shed light on Ferrell: “Old School,” to be released Sept. 27, in which Ferrell, Luke Wilson and Vince Vaughn play thirtysomething friends who start their own fraternity next door to a college; “Elf,” with Ferrell as a human being raised at the North Pole who discovers that he isn’t actually an elf; and “Ron Burgundy,” with Ferrell cast as a longtime local newsman suddenly saddled with a female co-anchor (think Jerry Dunphy in smaller market and circa 1976).

If all three are made, and even one becomes a hit, the meetings that Ferrell is taking with movie people will no doubt change. “I’m in that category of, ‘Oh, he’s funny,’” Ferrell said of the current response he elicits from executives. It isn’t hard to imagine what thought comes next: But can he open a movie?

If talent were the sole criterion, you’d want to bet on him. As he closes out his “SNL” tenure on May 18, the show’s season finale, Ferrell leaves behind a legacy worthy of all the “SNL” reruns that Comedy Central--and, soon, E! Entertainment Television--air to fill out the day.

In addition to George W. Bush, Ferrell was Alex Trebek, the simmering, superior “Jeopardy!” host. He was Craig, Spartan Spirit cheerleader; and Marty Culp, middle school music teacher who, with wife Bobbi, performed horrific covers of pop hits that inevitably had the kids hurling garbage at the stage. He was James Lipton, the constipated-with-awe host of Bravo’s “Inside the Actors Studio.”

If the disparate characters had anything in common, it was that they were infused with Ferrell’s ability to create comic tension between the exterior, contained self and the inner mess of a person who longed to get out.

On “SNL,” which too often settles for repertory players impersonating pop culture figures, Ferrell was less a mimic than an interpreter. And didn’t many of his characters seem on the verge of nervous breakdowns?

Sitting in a booth at Victors deli in Hollywood Friday night, Ferrell betrays a sense of eccentricity, hiding several layers of himself underneath the particular layer he was showing.

It was hard to imagine, given all those characters, that Ferrell comes from Irvine or that he enrolled at USC with aspirations of becoming a sports information director or broadcaster.

Ferrell ordered hot tea and said he had to get up early the next morning to go on a 20-mile run (three times around Griffith Park), part of a training regimen he and his wife, Viveca, are putting themselves through before running the Stockholm Marathon in June.

After the run, Ferrell was getting on a plane for New York to participate in NBC’s 75th anniversary celebration, a TV event broadcast Sunday night and about which Ferrell seemed a little dubious.

In giving up his TV job, Ferrell leaves behind lots of money and characters that are owned by the show, not by the performer. To that end, Michaels has turned “SNL” into an incubator for quick-and-dirty features based on show sketches.

The movies, produced by Michaels and backed by Paramount Pictures and NBC, are supposed to spawn the next “Wayne’s World” franchise. Only this hasn’t much happened.

Ferrell has appeared in a slew of them, co-starring in 1998’s “A Night at the Roxbury,” which was based on two disco-hopping characters performed on the show by Ferrell and Chris Kattan.

Yet that movie and others--including last year’s “Zoolander,” in which Ferrell played an evil fashion designer--have failed to move him beyond the “Oh, he’s funny” perception.

Now, Ferrell is focusing on new ideas, including “Ron Burgundy,” the news anchor comedy, which Ferrell dreamed up with “SNL” writer Adam McKay.

He and McKay want to recapture the spirit of the “Animal House” and “Caddyshack” ensemble bacchanals that featured “SNL” alumni John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Bill Murray but were more than simply star vehicles.

“Adam and I feel like comedy films are missing what those late ‘70s comedies had,” Ferrell said.

He knows that making a movie can be painstaking--unlike the seat-of-the-pants manner in which comedy sometimes happens on “SNL.”

He’ll miss the action, the high-wire act of doing live TV, the Fridays on which he and the writers are still throwing together the Bush sketch, pending breaking news. Comedians, like presidents, have their term limits.