Steve Carell on the loose

When Steve Carell finally shot his last scenes as the iconically icky boss and star of TV’s The Office, what did he do next?

“We went to Disney World!” exclaims Carell of his family outing with his wife Nancy and their two kids, Annie, 10, and Johnny, 7. “It was fantastic. We lived the cliché!”

For the Carells, there was plenty of reason to celebrate Super Bowl style. After seven groundbreaking seasons of playing Michael Scott, the boss America hates to love, and facing down 50 (he turns 49 next month), Carell is bidding farewell to Scranton, Pennsylvania’s most famous glass office and focusing on being Super Dad to his young children.

And, oh yes, the actor has a new job, too: bankable movie star. In the romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love, opening July 29, he plays a devoted husband trying to win back his wife opposite Hollywood heavyweights Julianne Moore and Ryan Gosling.

It was more than a year ago, in April 2010, that Carell casually mentioned his Office departure during a British radio interview, never imagining the furor it would cause.

“It was an off-the-cuff remark — an actor on a show deciding not to renew his contract,” he says. “I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

He never doubted that the show would go on without him.

“I never had that burden on my shoulders thinking that people would be out of work if I chose to leave,” he says. “And ultimately, it will be beneficial to repopulate and come up with new story lines.” At presstime, no replacement had been named.

Carell, for one, has no regrets. “I never second-guessed it,” he says. “That’s a sign of a good life decision.”

So far, so good. Thanks to his newly-acquired abundance of quality time, Carell is savoring his new phase of parenthood: taking Johnny to his first Los Angeles Lakers game (“it blew his mind”); ferrying his kids to school; skiing in Utah together over spring break (“the first I have had off as long as they have been alive”).

“Being with my family was my priority,” he says. “That was my number one reason for my decision.”

Carell summarizes his new bliss this way:

“I’m nesting,” he announces. “It’s great because I don’t put as much weight on every single moment with my family. I don’t have to utilize every second I have. I can have nothing-time, relaxing. We can be bored together.”

“That,” he adds, “can be fun too.”

Indeed, during a light-hearted photo shoot in Los Angeles, he is the very picture of at ease. After mugging as a camera-wielding tourist, he settles into an armchair looking relaxed and casual in a cardigan sweater, pressed cache trousers and brown suede bucks. “I have hung up the suit,” he says definitively. “No more Michael Scott.”

In Crazy, Stupid, Love, Carell plays Cal Weaver, a man who gets dumped by his wife (Moore), tutored in the ways of women (by Gosling), has a swinging fling (with Marisa Tomei), and then valiantly tries to win his wife back (from Kevin Bacon). Jokes Carell: “I’m all about love now.”

In all seriousness, even those closest to him are surprised by the turn. “My wife and I have discussed this,” he says. “She says not in a million years did I expect you to be a romantic lead in any sort of a movie.”

She wasn’t the only one. Gosling says even Carell didn’t think he could do justice to his onscreen tranformation into lady-killer. No problem, says Gosling, known himself for both his on- off-screen romancing.

“The general consensus on set was Steve was bringing the heat,” Gosling says. “All the girls were a-flutter behind the monitor.”

Co-star Moore easily rattles off the reasons the Carell makes women weak in the knees. “He’s very handsome, very funny, he really connects,” she says. Sexiest of all, she adds: “He’s so devoted to his family. He brings them up in most every conversation. ”

Off-screen, Carell practices his own set of love rules that would make most women swoon, especially, as he notes, with the “game-changing” addition of kids.

“Every time I get up at 5:15 and I’m drinking a cup of coffee I think of her,” he says of Nancy, his wife of 16 years. She prepares and sets the coffeemaker timer each night to ensure he has fresh java regardless of his on-set call time. “It’s really a small thing. But it’s a very romantic thing.”

For his part, he is known to iron a shirt Nancy plans to wear. “Better to do little, romantic things on a regular basis than buy a big set of diamond earrings every three years,” Carell says. “The small things remind you of why you’re with this person.” Sigh.

Onscreen, the Carell love train isn’t stopping anytime soon. His next film, Seeking a Friend For the End of the World co-starring Keira Knightley, is about a man searching to find his high school love before the world is struck by an asteroid. An added bonus: the movie shoots in L.A., where Carell and his family live.