Long before Will Ferrell was winning Emmys and doing captain bits on Saturday Night Live, he was just a USC kid taking on “fun, dumb jobs” to get by, including a single shift at Disneyland that ended with the Dallas Cowboys in his HR file.
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On Good Hang with Amy Poehler, he revealed the day he learned he won’t get to work at the ride he wants, and a job on the beach sounded better.
“I got a job, and you were paid for the orientation day to work at Disneyland,” Ferrell said amid laughs. “And I thought that I was going to be assigned to be one of the really fun jobs like the Jungle Cruise operator. And I find out, oh no, those guys work there for eight years before they get – so they assign me one of the front kiosks for selling tickets. At the same time, I had a rival offer to work at a friend’s surf shop. A friend that was managing a surf shop right down at Newport Beach. Same pay, $5.50 an hour.
“But I was too embarrassed to call up Disneyland. So my friend John called on my behalf, and said, ‘I will be quitting after one day.’ And they asked, ‘Okay, a reason for leaving?’ And he said, ‘I have a tryout with the Dallas Cowboys.’ And they went, ‘Thank you very much.’ So, somewhere, there’s a file at Disney corporate, it says, ‘Will Ferrell worked for one day. Reason for leaving: tryout with the Dallas Cowboys football team.”
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Now, Ferrell isn’t sneaking in a real Cowboys dream here. He’s a documented Seattle Seahawks fan, tied to his friendship with USC legend Pete Carroll – who went on to coach the Seahawks for 14 long seasons. The Dallas line was simply a clean joke to get out of a bad fit, not a missed chance.
The rest of Will Ferrell’s career path tracks the same way: sports on one side, bits on the other. He studied sports information at USC, took improv classes, joined the Groundlings in Los Angeles, then jumped to SNL in 1995. He has since also built a movie run that includes Elf, Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, among many others.
Along the way, he’s also turned that one-day Disneyland gig into a resume topped with serious accolades. He earned the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2011, got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015, and has multiple Primetime Emmys for Succession, Drunk History, and other projects. All of this sits on top of a career that retained his “briefcase job” fear of show business, and still pushed him to be great in it anyway.
So, the Dallas Cowboys fended off a one-day detour, and gave Ferrell a perfect sports-adjacent origin story. Since then, football has even brought him to Netflix’s The Roast of Tom Brady, where he got a standing ovation just for walking up to the podium. Somewhere in Disney’s files, he’s still the kid who got a chance to play for America’s Team. That line now reads like the most Will Ferrell way possible to exit a job he never really wanted.
