Steve Carell, at the time he was cast for Little Miss Sunshine, was a relative unknown in Hollywood. According to an article in Entertainment Weekly, the producers of the film worried that he wasn’t a big enough star and didn’t have much acting experience.
However, between the time the film was shot in the summer of 2005 and its release in the summer of 2006, Carell became a huge success as the star of …The 40 Year-Old Virgin…and the leading character of the popular NBC Emmy-winning television series The Office, which premiered in March 2005. In the span of just one year, Carell had become such a star that the producers had gone from protesting his casting to tapping him to do prominent promotion for the film.
