LOS ANGELES — It was easy for Jennifer Garner and Steve Carell to slip into their roles in the new family comedy “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.”
“We are both parents,” Garner says. “Not together, but apart.”
“And we’re the BEST parents,” Carell adds.
They definitely needed all of their parenting skills to play the mom and dad to a young boy who makes a birthday wish that his family has a bad day. And, by bad day, that means wrecking the family car, destroying a high school play production, making Dick Van Dyke mad and ruining a prom date.
The production — based on the best-selling children’s book of the same name — shows how family support helps with the worst of days. This is where Garner and Carell counted on their own life experiences: Garner has three children and Carell has two.
“We would pipe up and make our thoughts known,” Garner says.
“If anything rang false to us, we would speak up,” Carell adds. “More often than not, things felt like they would feel in our houses.”