Ed Helms opens up about how his ‘Hangover’ co-stars helped keep him grounded

Comedian Ed Helms says that his life after “The Hangover” was met with a whirlwind of side effects. Fortunately, he says, his co-stars Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis kept him grounded.

On Dec. 26, the actor — whose already burgeoning career in comedy skyrocketed after the 2009 blockbuster — spoke about the overwhelm at the time during a recent episode of the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast.

“It was a tornado of fame and a lot of buffeting,” he joked before describing the experience as “very overwhelming.”

For his portrayal of the Stu — the dentist on tenterhooks —Helms saw a boon to his career in which there were endless options.

“I was getting scripts for all these different kinds of projects,” he explained. “I was kind of spinning out and panicking about different things like ‘Like what kind of a career do you want?’... And just all these weird conversations with agents and reps and trying to figure out, I definitely felt a lot of anxiety and identity ...turmoil.”

The actor added during the interview that he felt “lucky” his previous roles allowed his public persona to undergo a gradual rise. In going from basic cable to network television he was able to experience a taste of fame before he reached stardom.

“When I was on basic cable on ‘The Daily Show,’ we had what Colbert liked to call ‘toy fame,’ which is like you can still walk around and do anything, and you don’t get really recognized very often,” he noted. “Someone at the airport who works at like Einstein Bagels will be like, ‘this one’s on the house.’”

Helms explained how he experienced the next “ratchet-up” to this level of notoriety once he began to portray the character Andy Bernard on “The Office.”

“I was definitely getting recognized a lot more, and Andy had weird catchphrases, which of course, upped the ante with public recognition,” he explained. “So I had some skills set, I guess, and just in sort of dealing with that, but then ‘The Hangover’ was a whole other level.”

Helms went on to describe himself as “lucky” for having Cooper and Galifianakis as part of his life at the time — particularly because they’d all reached relatively similar levels of success before the film.

Helms added that without the two actors, he wasn’t sure if he would “have stayed sane.”

“We all had each other just to commiserate and measure ourselves,” he noted “I think we kept each other from drifting too far by being too unprofessional. Like, I don’t know, it wasn’t a spoken thing. It wasn’t like we held each other accountable by yelling at each other or anything, but it was like if somebody was out of line or got, you know, a little too big for their britches. You could feel it on the set, and everyone would just sort of, like, settle back in.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com