Andy Richter is revealing a not-so-well-known fact about the cheery holiday movie Elf.
“There was this old mental hospital that had a couple empty wings, and that’s where the offices are, the Hobbs’ home, the mailroom; almost all the interiors of the movie are in a mental hospital that was still functioning a little bit. There was still a wing of the hospital that had patients in it,” the comedian, 60, exclusively told Us while promoting his new book, Elf Unwrapped: Behind the Scenes of a Modern Christmas Classic.
Richter notably played the character Morris in the film, and helped cowrite the new behind-the-scenes book. According to the actor and author, a “big vampire movie” was in the making, so studio space and filming locations were limited, which is why they shot scenes at Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam, British Columbia, near Vancouver.
“I wasn’t wandering around. … I went to the set. I went to the trailer. I got in the van. I went back to the hotel,” he said.
Richter did, however, speculate about what patients thought of Will Ferrell roaming the facility in his Buddy the Elf costume while shooting.
“Will was all over that place for a month or two, like what people were thinking? Patients were looking out the window and seeing this guy in February wandering around in an elf costume, and maybe recognizing, ‘Hey, isn’t that Will Ferrell?’” he joked.
Richter’s book uncovers new information about the making of the 2003 holiday classic through research and interviews with the cast and crew. Ferrell, 59, even wrote the foreword.
Richter shared he’s still close with some of his former Elf colleagues.
”Oh, the people I still talk to… Will Ferrell is probably the main one, and then Kent Alterman. … He was the one. The script was shown to him [and] he said, ‘I bet Will Ferrell would be great for this.’”
He also revealed that he and Zooey Deschanel, who played Jovie in the flick, go way back.
“I’ve known Zooey since she was a teenager, just because we lived in the same neighborhood, and we were in a movie together,” Richter said before revealing that Selma Blair was considered to play Deschanel’s character.
“I found out from Zooey that they talked about Selma Blair doing it before she was on board,” the comedian told Us. “Zooey told us that apparently at that time Selma Blair was like a big skateboarder, and so they were going to maybe have Jovi skateboard around Manhattan, which would have been interesting in December in Manhattan, somebody skateboarding around.”
Blair, 54, wasn’t the only A-list starlet up for the role, either.
“When I met with Jon Favreau, the director, I walked in and he was like, ‘Oh, you don’t need to read. We just offered it to Katie Holmes,’” Deschanel, 46, said on a December 2025 episode of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast with Alex Cooper. “And I was like, ‘Oh, OK, cool.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, sit down and talk for a minute.’ I was like, ‘OK!’”
She auditioned anyway and was offered the role when Holmes dropped out of the movie.
Richter’s Elf Unwrapped: Behind the Scenes of a Modern Christmas Classic hits bookshelves on November 3.
