Hold On!!! Jake Johnson as a Steroids Dealer Was Edited Out of ‘Step Brothers’?!?!

Jake Johnson was in "Step Brothers." Sort of. Technically. For a while.

The reveal arrived sideways, the way the best ones do. Rich was talking about Mary Steenburgen, and how the same actress who did "Elf" also did what he called about as rude a film as there could possibly be, when Johnson dropped in with four words.

"Cut out of Step Brothers."

"What?" Rich said.

"My first job ever."

Not his first comedy. Not his first studio movie. His first gig, period. He got the call that McKay wanted him to come in, which he described with the appropriate level of disbelief for a young actor with nothing on his résumé.

The role was small and perfect. Rob Riggle's character gets a flashback to the first time he does steroids. Johnson played the guy handing them over.

"I played a character named Razor," he said, and then performed the pitch. "Hey, man, you might like these."

"What do they do?"

"Just trust me."

And then the movie cuts away, permanently, from Jake Johnson's screen career debut.

"But I was in that movie technically," he said.

Rich, being thorough, had follow-up questions about Riggle's most famous contribution to that film. Was it pow, or was it pa?

"Pow," Johnson confirmed.

That led to the actual story of the segment, which has nothing to do with steroids and everything to do with Rob Riggle being a force of nature. The two met later, on "21 Jump Street," and Johnson's introduction to him happened at a hotel in New Orleans.

Riggle spotted him, greeted him like a brother, and started gathering intelligence. His wife was leaving at 3:00. What room was Johnson in? Was he off until Monday, like Riggle was? Maybe they would get dinner.

Dinner was not the plan.

"A minute after 3:00 when his wife left, I open the door, and this maniac comes in with moonshine," Johnson said. "What's up, man? Welcome to New Orleans. We're about to have some fun."

The next 14 hours were, by Johnson's accounting, the craziest of his life. He described being in a sauna with Riggle at six in the morning, one of them delivering some monologue while the other delivered a competing one over the top of it.

"I'm like, not only do I love this guy, but this is the craziest 14 hours," Johnson said. "I woke up the next day, I was like, okay, now I'm going to love Rob Riggle until the day I die."

He also called him unthinkably funny and said he wants to work with him at any chance possible, which after that story reads less like a compliment and more like a warning.

The best craft note came from a much quieter place, and it was about the film Johnson has now, the one Mary Steenburgen and Ed Harris are both in. Rich pointed out that Harris is not a name anyone associates with freely associating silliness, and Johnson's explanation of why that turned out to be the asset is the most interesting thing he said all segment.

"I think this is Ed's first comedy," Johnson said. "And what I loved about it is he played it like a drama."

That changed the temperature of the set. Johnson said the two-shots he had with Harris felt like they were making a small drama about fathers and sons. On most comedies, a dropped line means you shrug and go again, because you are getting a lot of takes anyway. With Harris, a dropped line got a "God damn it."

So Johnson started matching him. Faking his own frustration. Playing it real.

"But what it does is it brings a backbone to the movie," he said, "where you're like, oh, now we got some stakes."

The fear the rest of the cast plays in those scenes was not fully written that way. It came from Harris being in the room. And the moment that sets it up was not written at all.

"That scene where I first see him in the house, I go to shake his hand and he doesn't shake," Johnson said. "Fully improvised."