The 40-Year-Old Virgin

A middle-aged nookyphobe (The Office‘s Steve Carell) is enjoying an uncomplicated life of action-figure collecting until his co-workers discover he’s a virgin and make it their goal to get him some. Happily, his dream girl turns out to be a divorcée (Catherine Keener) with grandchildren who wants to wait. ”It’s an entire movie about a man avoiding sex under the guise of trying to have it,” says director Judd Apatow (Freaks and Geeks). ”It’s the first performance-anxiety comedy of the new century.”

To truly capture a land of gropes and dreams, Apatow mined his and the cast’s own pubescent pasts for stories, turning the set into a Ministry of Too Much Information. Take this one: ”After I lost my virginity in high school,” Apatow reveals with too little prompting, ”as a joke, I turned to the woman next to me and said, ‘Hey, was it good for you, too?’ And she looked at me and said, ‘I guess it’ll get better.”’

Apatow hails Virgin as the proud return of that ’80s staple, the R-rated comedy. ”It’s fun to work with a studio when their big note is ‘Earn the R! If you’re gonna be R, be big R….’ I know the movie pushes the envelope because I can’t even explain to my 7-year-old daughter what it’s about. She says, ‘Daddy, what’s a virgin?’ and I say, ‘I can’t tell you.’ ‘Can I go to the set?’ ‘No!”’