Paul Walter Hauser on the challenge of playing Chris Farley: “I’ve been practicing to play him my entire life”

Paul Walter Hauser is one of the busiest actors in Hollywood, and one of his many (and I mean many) upcoming projects is a Chris Farley biopic. Stepping into the shoes of the iconic comedian is no small task, but Hauser told Variety that he’s been “practicing to play Chris Farley my entire life.“

Hauser has played a handful of real-life people throughout his career, including Shawn Eckhardt in I, Tonya, Richard Jewell in Richard Jewell, and Larry Hall in Black Bird, but Farley is by far the most well-known, which makes Hauser’s task more difficult.

“Everybody’s going to judge the crap out of the movie and have very passionate, hard-line opinions. I’m not worried about playing Chris because I know I’m going to approach it with a lot of love and effort,” Hauser said. “At the end of the day, all you can do is work hard and try your best to love the character and the project as much as possible. To me, that doesn’t seem like much of a hurdle with Chris. I adore him. I want to honor him. I want people to leave the theater, having laughed and cried together.“

Josh Gad will direct the Chris Farley biopic, which is based on the New York Times best-selling biography The Chris Farley Show: A Biography in Three Acts by Tom Farley Jr. and Tanner Colby. The script is by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.

Now, about those many projects Hauser is involved in. The actor can currently be heard voicing Embarrassment in Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and will next be seen starring alongside Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, and Hong Chau in The Instigators, a heist thriller directed by Doug Liman. The film will hit theaters on August 2nd before streaming on Apple TV+ on August 9th. He’s also set to appear in The Naked Gun reboot with Liam Neeson and will star in Press Your Luck, which depicts the ’84 cheating scandal orchestrated by Michael Larson. He will also star alongside Mark Wahlberg in Peter Farrelly’s action comedy Balls Up and will appear in Marvel’s long-awaited Fantastic Four movie.