A respected character actor turned big time movie comic, Walk Hard's John C Reilly takes Blockbuster.co.uk behind the scenes of his latest comedy.

Formerly perceived as a purveyor of weighty dramas, actor's actor John C. Reilly has transformed of late into a comedian's comedian. Though the funny was always within him, peeping out in movies like Boogie Nights (1997), it took Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) to bring it all the way to the surface. Having feasted on the laughter of others and developed a taste for it, Reilly now returns with his first full-on, funny starring role. "The film is called Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and it tells the life story of the musical legend Dewey Cox," says Reilly in a nutshell. "I think that by watching this movie, you will come to love Cox - if you didn't already."

An amalgamation of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly and pretty much every other music legend of the past half-century, Dewey Cox, says his alter-ego, "starts out as this guy in Springberry, Alabama, a country boy who's interested in music and has had a somewhat troubled past. He gets involved in music and writes a song called Walk Hard, which becomes a huge hit, and like in so many music biopics, the road to fame is a rocky one and has its ups and downs. We have a lot of fun with musicians' stories in general and we try and incorporate a lot of the rock stories that we have heard over the years, and pour them all in to this one character. Ironically, by the end of the movie, you end up feeling for the guy. Despite us taking the piss along the way, you spend that much time with a person from 14 to 72 and you can't help but feel for him. He's been through so much!"

A spoof of musical biopics like Walk the Line and Ray, Walk Hard comes from prolific funnyman Judd Apatow, producer of Talladega Nights and Superbad, director of Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and producer and co-writer of Walk Hard, to name just a handful of his comedy credentials. "The secret to Judd's success, and the reason that actors as well as audiences really like him, is that he's so honest," explains Reilly. "He decided when he got the chance to make his own films - because he'd been working for a long time as a writer behind the scenes for Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler - when he finally got the chance to tell his stories, he made the bold choice of telling the truth. 'I don't care if it's a taboo subject, I don't care if it makes me look stupid,' he just laid it all on the line, from 40-Year-Old Virgin to Knocked Up to all the movies he produced and co-wrote as well. He tells the truth, and he tells it in a really frank way, and he lets the actors improvise in a really truthful way because it's just coming off the top of their heads. And in today, with the media being so carefully controlled and vetted by lawyers and designed carefully not to offend, it turns out being honest is a really radical thing to do."

With Judd Apatow at the helm, committing to Walk Hard was a total no brainer, says Reilly. "Judd asked me to do it. We'd worked on Talladega Nights together, and I knew he was a brilliant comedic mind. It's not every day that someone says, 'hey we've written a movie for you - would you like to star in it?' So it was not exactly a tough decision to make!"

Besides his comedy chops, Reilly's musical abilities guaranteed there was no other star in Hollywood better qualified to play Cox. "I've been playing music and performing music since I was a child - I did a lot of musicals as a kid. In my twenties I learned to play the guitar - I always had music around me - it was something I always did as a hobby. I would always bring a guitar with me on location or when I was travelling, and slowly but surely music came into my acting life, going back to Boogie Nights and Chicago, it started to crop up." And again, even more prominently, in Robert Altman's final feature A Prairie Home Companion (2006). "If you have any ability, eventually it'll end up in a film. Like if you can tap dance, eventually someone will find out and need you to tap-dance in a movie. Well, I guess the word is out that I can play guitar and sing!"

The musical performances, notes Reilly, were by far his favourite scenes to shoot, so much so that he volunteered to promote the movie in the States with a string of live appearances as his hard walking alter ego. "In terms of interacting with the fans it's one thing to introduce a movie and say, 'hey, thanks for coming,' but it's another thing to take them from the screening and bring them to a music club and perform all the music from the movie. It's ridiculous. I should not be getting paid for it. Wait, I'm not." Turns out there's something more important than money. "To hear a whole club of people shouting 'We want Cox' before a show," says Reilly with a grin, "that's something everybody should experience in their lifetime."

John C Reilly Filmography

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