Will Ferrell’s New True Story Movie Role Is Stranger Than Fiction

When Will Ferrell played Buddy the Elf in the 2003 film Elf, he explained how he traveled from the North Pole to New York.

“First, I traveled through the seven levels of the candy cane forest, past the sea of twirly-swirly gumdrops, and then, I walked through the Lincoln tunnel.”

However, in Ferrell’s new film project, traveling back to the North Pole will be a bit harder.

Will Ferrell has teamed up with Temple Hill and Sony Pictures to re-create the true-life adventure of a group of everyday guys who decided that they wanted to travel to the North Pole via snowmobile, reports the Christian Post. This is not another Will Ferrell joke. The story will be based on the events as reported by the New York Times Magazine article “Ice Pack: An Insurance Salesman and a Doctor Walk Into a Bar, and End Up at the North Pole” written by Guy Lawson.

“It was March 7, 1968, and the members of the Plaisted Polar Expedition looked up at the plane in bewilderment. They were trying to travel to the North Pole by snowmobile — in what they believed to be the first expedition to the North Pole carried out on motorized machines, but what in reality may very well have been the first to reach the North Pole at all,” begins the article.

This sounds like a classic adventure film about talented yet daring outdoorsmen. In reality, though, the team consisted of Ralph Plaisted, who was an insurance salesman; Art Aufderheide, a doctor; Walter Pederson, a local Honda dealer; Jerry Pitzel, a geography teacher; and Jean Luc Bombardier, who may have been the most prepared as he was an athlete from Canada.

According to the Christian Post, the men even got sponsors to provide them with whiskey, designer watches, and food that was used in the Apollo program.

Ferrell’s new film will actually be Lawson’s second article that has been turned into a movie. His first, “The Stone Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders,” which was written for Rolling Stone, became the book Arms and the Dudes. It has since been adapted by Warner Bros. and will be released this summer as the film War Dogs.

There is no word on which character Will Ferrell will play in the proposed movie and no director or writer is said to be attached as of yet, but Jonathan Kadin will oversee the project. Temple Hill last worked with Ferrell for 2010’s Everything Must Go.

Although Will Ferrell has made nearly 50 movies, his movies tend to be hit or miss with fans and critics alike. According to Box Office Mojo, Ferrell’s most recent appearance in Zoolander 2 is ranked as No. 23 among his most successful movies, but Daddy’s Home, which arrived in theaters two months earlier, is ranked as No. 3. As it turns out, a movie about the North Pole could be a good move for Ferrell, as Elf is ranked No. 2. (Incidentally, the most successful film that Will Ferrell has been a part of was 2014’s The Lego Movie. The least was 1999’s The Suburbans).

Before Will Ferrell became a household name as a cast member on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, Will worked at an auction house with a flexible schedule that allowed him to audition for acting jobs. Will managed to land a few bit parts for such sitcoms as Grace Under Fire and Living Single, various commercials, and the low-budget horror flick A Bucket of Blood. One winter, he even took a job working as a Santa Claus at a local mall.

Before this new North Pole adventure, look for Ferrell in the upcoming Zeroville, which is expected to be released later this year, and The House in 2017.

[Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images]