Last month, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith and Hollywood funnyman Will Ferrell engaged in a televised drum-off to settle their doppelgänger differences once and for all.
Now the celebrity lookalikes have united against a common foe and laid down another drumming gauntlet to another famous skin-thumper: Metallica’s Lars Ulrich
“I mean, we did talk about another drum-off… with a third person that looks eerily similar to Chad and I,” Ferrell tells SPIN in an interview following his and Smith’s square-off on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show.
“A third drummer out there,” he continues. “Lars gets pissed because he gets mistaken for both me and Chad Smith. He can settle that score now, too.” With the Chili Pepper confirming the issue of challenge, “there it is. The gauntlet is down.”
Ulrich has yet to officially respond to the challenge, but he should be match-fit to take on the Smith/Ferrell lookalike tag-team considering Metallica are gearing up to headline Glastonbury next month (assuming 25,000 animal activists don’t get them banned from the UK festival). “Lars gets pissed because he gets mistaken for both me and Chad Smith. He can settle that score now, too…”
Elsewhere in the SPIN interview, Smith recalls the first time he met his ‘separated at birth’ nemesis, at an after-party buffet table. “We both turned at the same time to each other with our plates of food. And [Ferrell] just looked me up and down really quick and said, ‘You’re very handsome’,” recalls the drummer; “I was like, ‘God, he’s funny.'”
The pair also joked about the involvement of Questlove, of Tonight Show house band The Roots, who helped out a little with Ferrell’s on-camera drumming. When quizzed about the matter, Ferrell responded, “I find that question insulting. I worked so hard to prepare for the drum battle.”
The Chili Pepper and the Anchorman star also discuss their thoughts on EDM (“I gotta give them credit… guys who can make hundreds of thousands of dollars for literally pushing a button”), and the recent frisbee-catching abilities of Weezer drummer Pat Wilson.
“Frisbees? I’ve seen Will catch ninja stars,” Smith said. “I once caught a marlin while I was drumming,” Ferrell said. “We once had a drum-off on the deck of a boat. And I snagged a marlin right out of the air.”
Maybe the touted Metallica drum-off with Ulrich should be about catching hurled items without missing a beat rather than the “traditional drum-off with traditional rules” from the Tonight Show grudge match. Re-visit the magic below, complete with the surprise cowbell-enhanced finalé.
