Will Ferrell's Wedding Crashers cameo wasn't in original script

Will Ferrell agreed to make a cameo appearance in Wedding Crashers at the very last minute.

Towards the end of the 2005 comedy, which starred Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as friends who crash weddings to pick up women, the funnyman makes a surprising and memorable cameo as the kimono-wearing Chazz Reinhold, their mentor who now crashes funerals.

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the comedy, penned by Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, this week, director David Dobkin opened up about making the movie with Entertainment Weekly and revealed the unexpected scene wasn't in the script.

"This scene wasn't in the movie, and there was a moment when Owen was like, 'Wouldn't it be funny if we crashed funerals?'" he recalled. "It didn't really fit in that opening montage, and then later when I was looking for an all is lost moment I said, 'Owen, what if you go see Chazz? You mention this guy Chazz and we never see him in the movie. What if you wanted to go see this guy to get some advice and he was crashing funerals?'... And so Owen kind went and wrote that scene."

They turned to Ferrell, who had worked with Wilson on Zoolander and Vaughn on Old School, but they still hadn't nailed him down the night before the scene was to be shot. However, he arrived on set in the morning and they wrapped the scene after five takes, with Dobkin encouraging Ferrell to act "crazier" every time.

"I really believe that I directed him by just saying 'more' until he had that fifth take and that is the whole take that is in the movie. It was one of those things that you shoot and you're like, 'Is this really going to work?' It's a pretty weird sequence," he added.

Dobkin recently teamed up with Ferrell and Rachel McAdams again for Netflix comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.