From having his chest waxed in The 40 Year-Old Virgin to eating lipstick in Anchorman 2, there aren't many things Steve Carell won't do for a laugh.

But a scene in the comic actor's latest film was even more unusual than most, as his character comes face-to-face with an escaped kangaroo at an Australia-themed children's party.

"Kangaroos are freaky animals," says Carell, who plays dad-of-four Ben Cooper in Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

"Very cute, but I never got a sense of what that kangaroo was going to do, or where that kangaroo's mind was at. But all the animals worked out well. We didn't lose any of the kids, so it was good."

It's just one of the chaotic moments in the Disney film, which follows the exploits of calamity-prone 11-year-old Alexander (played by newcomer Ed Oxenbould).

As the schoolboy wonders whether bad things only happen to him, his parents (Carell and Jennifer Garner) and siblings begin to experience their very own disastrous day.

From vomiting children and a botched job interview, to the driving test from hell (and the aforementioned kangaroo on the loose), everything that could go wrong, does - a scenario Carell, who is father to Elisabeth, 13, and John, 10, with actress wife Nancy, can understand.

"Jen [Garner] and I are both parents, and we'd keep a very close eye on whether these things were relevant to us as we were going through [the film]," he says.

"I didn't want it to be one of those movies that's just full of cliches, I wanted to present a family that is loving, but not in an overly sentimental way. A real family, a modern kind of family, and a family that I identify with."

It helped that the pair's young co-stars were "the sweetest kids that we could have asked for - not like weird, actor-robot kids," Carell notes.

So what's the most terrible, horrible, no good day the Carell clan have ever experienced?

"We've never had a day exactly like this one, but we've had bits and pieces over the years that would add up to a day like this," the 52-year-old says with a smile.

"If you're a parent, you've had a day where your son or daughter doesn't have a diaper on and they decide to pee and you have to deal with that; diaper bags breaking open and diapers going everywhere; not being able to find things; stuff falling out of the fridge when you don't have any time to clean it up."

Carell and Nancy, who wed in 1995, met at the Chicago improvisation troupe The Second City (she was a student in a class he was teaching), and have appeared alongside each other in Carell's breakthrough movie The 40 Year-Old Virgin and the US version of The Office (in which he plays the David Brent role). More recently, they co-created upcoming police procedural TV comedy Angie Tribeca, starring Rashida Jones.

Finding humour in all that life throws at you is important to Massachusetts-born Carell, who worked as a postman before finding fame.

"You have to be able to laugh at yourself. Bad stuff's going to happen. It happens for everybody, you can't avoid it," he says.

"I do like the lesson [in the film] that you have to sort of go along with it and accept it. Alexander, at one point, says: 'You have to have bad days to appreciate the good ones'. And I think there's truth in that. It's all relative and bad days sort of give context to the good."

At some points in the film, however, the pressure of staying positive gets too much for out-of-work dad Ben, who has taken on the role of 'Fommy' (father/mommy) as Garner's character pursues her career.

"I identified with Ben because, as a dad, you feel like you need to be this steady hand - the rock," Carell admits.

"And at a certain point, when that well runs dry, where do you go?"

He'll next be seen on screen in a much meatier role, playing eccentric US multi-millionaire and murderer John du Pont in Foxcatcher.

The film tells the true-life story of du Pont, whose friendship with wrestling brothers Dave and Mark Schultz (Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum), ended in tragedy.

Carell has been tipped for an Oscar for his performance, but insists taking on such a dark role wasn't a strategic career shift.

"I was not actively pursuing this movie or role," he says. "It was not a master plan that this dark role was something I would undertake."

Having finished playing a killer in Foxcatcher and a kangaroo chaser on the Alexander film, he recently got to enjoy a bit of 'Fommy' time himself.

"I haven't done anything for the last year really. I've just been taking my kids to school and picking them up, going to their sports practices and games and plays," Carell says.

"That's my favourite thing, really. I think that's what defines me more than anything. That's where I feel most at ease and most at home."

EXTRA TIME - FILMS WITH LONG TITLES

:: Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964) - Directed and co-written by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellers, this black comedy follows an unhinged US Air Force general who orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and public officials' attempts to try and recall the bombers.

:: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) - Helen Mirren stars as a restaurateur's wife who is fed up with her gangster husband and embarks on a fling with a customer, with a little help from the restaurant staff.

:: The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain (1995) - Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald star in this 1917-set film about English cartographers who must tell a Welsh village that their mountain is only a hill.

:: Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan (2006) - Sacha Baron Cohen plays Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, who travels across the US meeting real-life people under the premise of learning more about their culture.

:: The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007) - This Western, starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, is based on Ron Hansen's 1983 novel of the same name.

:: Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is out now in Scotland and released across the rest of the UK and Ireland on Friday, October 24