The four consecutive consonants in my last name, Krstić, make it well nigh unpronounceable to the delicate American tongue, and lead to much hilarity every time someone tries to introduce me at a conference.
Now Ubuntu’s Kevin Cole points out a news item on the upcoming flick Get Smart:
[Steve] Carell plays Maxwell Smart, a newly assigned field agent for the super-secret agency CONTROL. He stars opposite Anne Hathaway as Agent 99 and Alan Arkin as the Chief in the reboot of the classic 1960s spy-spoof TV series.
“I try specifically not to laugh when someone else is doing their thing, because if you laugh and ruin someone else’s take, if someone’s doing something inspired or incredibly funny, it’s a gift, and to take that away by laughing and ruining it, that’s a cardinal sin in my mind,” Carell said. “But there are some times you just can’t help yourself. The scene in the movie, when Alan is trying to pronounce a name [in] the Cone of Silence sequence, … the scene probably took five times longer than it should have because … I couldn’t control myself. And so I took that gift from Alan Arkin.”
Arkin improvised some of the scene, in which he struggles to pronounce the name of an enemy agent, Krstić.
“That just killed me,” Carell said.
Look, it’s okay to use my name, but Hollywood and I have a deal: no biopics. My life as a super-secret enemy agent is off limits. Evidently director Peter Segal didn’t get the memo.
The henchmen have been dispatched.
