First impressions

Steve Carell is ready for his first time.

After stealing scenes from stars Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell in such movies as “Bruce Almighty” and “Anchorman” – not to mention a four-year run as a sidekick on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart – Carell is taking center stage in his own film, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which opens today.

He’s also the star of NBC’s bitter workplace sitcom “The Office,” which returns in new episodes Sept. 20. And he’s slated to star in a film remake of the secret-agent spoof “Get Smart!”

His future hinges on how well “Virgin” is received. Strong box office for the relatively low-budget ($25 million) comedy could lead to more opportunities to write and star in his own movies.

It also could boost “The Office,” a remake of a lauded British sitcom that, with an average audience of 5.4 million viewers, is the lowest-rated series ever to get a second-season renewal.

It all has Carell, who turned 42 on Tuesday, sounding as anxious as his “Virgin” character.

“I’m so excited for people to see it, and I’m really nervous,” he says. “I’m worried how it will be and how I’ll be accepted in it.”

Fellow comics find themselves rallying around him for a reason that might surprise those who know him for his many turns as arrogant, incompetent jerks: He’s really nice.

“Everyone wants Steve to do well because he really is the nicest guy you would ever come across,” says “Virgin” director Judd Apatow, who produced “Anchorman” and created the short-lived but critically beloved TV shows “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared.”

“When we were working on the movie, he said to me – and he wasn’t kidding – ‘I’m just trying to be nice to the casting director, so if this bombs, she’ll at least cast me in another movie.’ This was the casting director he hired.”

Carell, also a producer on the film, plays a sweet but painfully shy middle-aged man whose friends unite to help him finally “go all the way.”

In real life, Carell’s showbiz pals joined together onscreen to help him make his big break. They include “Anchorman” players Paul Rudd and David Koechner; Mindy Kaling, co-writer and co-star of “The Office”; and Carell’s wife, Nancy Walls, also a former “Daily Show” correspondent.

It’s an offshoot of the so-called Frat Pack group of comedian friends that includes Ferrell, Jack Black, Vince Vaughn, Owen and Luke Wilson, and Ben Stiller, who tend to co-star in each other’s movies: “Anchorman,” “The Wedding Crashers,” “Dodgeball” and “Old School.”

“We’re now the JV (junior varsity) version of that,” Rudd jokes.

So why did no other headliners turn up in “Virgin” – like Vaughn, Black or Ferrell?

Apatow says it might have distracted the audience from Carell.

“There’s the temptation to ask every huge-star friend we have to be in the movie because everyone would have supported him in this effort,” the director says. “But we decided we shouldn’t do any huge cameos because maybe we can convince people that this world really exists.”

“The 40-Year-Old Virgin” might never have happened if not for casual invitation. One day during the “Anchorman” filming, Apatow said to Carell: “If you ever have an idea for a movie that you’d star in, let me know.”

And Carell had “a whole bunch.” One of them was “Virgin,” which Apatow ended up co-writing.

“I don’t think he”s a guy who was very aggressive about his career,” Apatow says.

“I don’t think he saw himself as a leading man, or maybe he thought that was a dream that just wasn’t going to come true. But he had the ideas ready to go.”

Carell acknowledges he can be a showbiz wallflower.

“In my wildest dreams I never thought … well, I never thought I’d work,” he says.

His “Virgin” character, he says, is another person who simply assumed things would never work out for him – so he quit trying.

“He’s likable and normal but is a slight degree of a hermit and has a huge secret,” Carell says. “I think it bothers him, but he’s getting through and trying to keep a stiff upper lip about it.”

Carell’s button-down look usually lands him comically villainous roles: the pompous newscasters on “The Daily Show” and in “Bruce Almighty,” or the embarrassingly self-absorbed middle manager in “The Office.”

“I play a lot of jerks,” he says. “It was fun to play a more sympathetic character (in ‘Virgin’). I just started (the second season) of ‘The Office,’ so it was kind of a weird transition back to the clueless idiot character.”

Carell impressed Apatow with his improvisational jokesmanship on “Anchorman.” In one sequence, where his dimwitted weatherman character was supposed to describe a drunken experience at a party, Carell supplied such varied takes as: “I drank a lava lamp. (Pause.) It wasn’t lava,” and “I ate a whole bunch of fiberglass insulation. It wasn’t cotton candy, like that guy said. My stomach’s itchy.”

Rudd says Carell makes a strong leading comic because “he’s very real. People like to see movies about real people, and I think that Steve comes off as somebody you would absolutely know.”

Raised in Acton, Mass., Carell started acting in plays in high school and at Ohio’s Denison College, but he says it was just a hobby.

When he was applying for law school, one of the essay questions was: “Why do you want to pursue a law degree?” As he recalls, “I had no answer other than, ‘It sounds good.’ “

His parents urged him to do what he loved – performing. Within a few months, he moved to Chicago with some friends and started taking comedy lessons with the Second City acting troupe, where John Belushi, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and John Candy got their starts.

When Carell was teaching Second City classes himself, he fell in love with a student who would be his future wife.

“It was unethical,” he jokes. “And delectable.” (He and Walls have two children, a 4-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son.)

Carell made ends meet with numerous stage appearances and little roles in movies like 1991’s “Curly Sue” and 1996’s short-lived “The Dana Carvey Show” before getting his break in 1999 on “The Daily Show.” He still contributes an occasional report for the show, most recently as a reporter who had been “embedded” in a spider hole in a remote section of Iraq for the past two years.

He expects the embarrassingly intimate topic of “Virgin” to lead to a lot of questions about his own early sexual history.

“I have a couple of different ways of dealing with it,” Carell says. “I will either tell a different story every time, so there will be a hundred different loss-of-virginity stories floating around. Or I’ll just do as my wife told me to do and not tell.

“It’s not a great story. I think 98 percent of the population has a similar story.”