Ed Helms certainly didn’t end up with the career his parents envisioned for him. “The Hangover”—and its two sequels—are as far from a traditional, buttoned-up, family-friendly comedy as a movie can get, and that ran right counter to Helms’s upbringing, as he shared with host Ted Danson on the SiriusXM podcast “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.”
“I grew up in a kind of repressed home in the South. Politically, very progressive, but still a kind of socially conservative environment,” Helms said ( via Variety ). “And so ‘The Hangover’ is crazy. That’s not what they raised me to do, to be in a movie like ‘The Hangover.’ So my parents—at that point, they’d seen me do crazy things on ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Office’—and so there was already some kind of acceptance, but still, I was nervous for my parents to see ‘The Hangover.'”
Helms, 35 when the first “Hangover” movie was released in 2009 ( and earned more than $469 million ), eventually put aside his nerves and took his parents to the premiere.
“I’m looking at my mom, the lights come on, and she’s crying. Tears are streaming down her face, and for a second, I’m like, ‘Did I just break my poor mom’s heart?'” Far from breaking her heart, Helms’s mother was impressed, telling the movie star’s son, “that was so funny” and giving him a big hug. “I’ll never forget that it was such a special moment,” she recalled.
Helms has spoken of the difficulty he faced with the sudden fame that came with the instant success of “The Hangover,” which catapulted him from television favorite to movie star.
“It was a tornado of fame and a lot of buffeting. It was very overwhelming,” Helms told Conan O’Brien on his podcast In 2022. “I was really reeling a lot of the time, like after ‘The Hangover,’ I was getting scripts for all these different kinds of projects. ‘Like what do I do? I don’t know.’ I was spinning my wheels and panicking about different things.
Helms credited his co-stars Zach Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper for keeping him grounded.
“If it weren’t for those guys, I don’t think I would have gotten any sane. But we all had each other to be like, you know, I don’t know, just to commiserate and measure ourselves,” Helms said. “And I think we kept each other from getting too far apart. And being very professional.”
