Ed Helms certainly did not end up having the career that his parents envisioned for him. “The Hangover” — and its two sequels — are about as far from traditional, buttoned-up, family-friendly comedy as a movie can get, and this ran precisely counter to Helms’ upbringing, as he shared with host Ted Danson on the SiriusXM podcast “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.”
“I grew up in a kind of a repressed Southern home. Politically, very progressive, but still a very socially conservative kind of environment,” Helms said (via Variety). “And so ‘The Hangover’ is nuts. 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 stuff on ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Office‘ — and so there was some sort of acceptance already, but, still, I was nervous for my parents to see ‘The Hangover.’”
Helms, 35 years old by the time the first “Hangover” movie was released in 2009 (and made over $469 million), ended up putting aside his nerves and taking his parents to the premiere.
“I’m looking at my mom, the lights come up, and she’s crying. Tears 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’ mother was impressed, telling her movie star son, “That was so funny” and giving him a big hug. “I’ll just never forget that was such a special moment,” he recalled.
Helms has previously spoken of the difficulty he had dealing with the sudden fame that came with the immediate success of “The Hangover,” which catapulted him from television favorite to major motion picture player.
“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 really was reeling a lot of the time, like in the aftermath of ‘The Hangover,’ I was getting scripts for all these different kinds of projects. ‘Like what do I do? I dunno.’ I was kind of spinning out and panicking about different things. Like, ‘Well, what kind of a career do you want?’”
Helms credited his co-stars Zach Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper for keeping his feet on the ground.
“If it wasn’t for those guys, I don’t think I would’ve stayed sane. But we all had each other to kind of be like, you know, I don’t know, just to commiserate and measure ourselves,” Helms said. “And I think we kept each other from drifting too far. And being too unprofessional.”