For Joel McHale, battling demonically possessed New Yorkers in his new movie “Deliver Us From Evil” was nothing compared to facing down a far more fearsome foe: Robert De Niro.
While hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in May, McHale took brave shots at President Obama, Chris Christie and members of Congress, but it was a dig at De Niro that brought him serious anxiety. Especially considering the legendary actor was sitting right in front of him.
“I don’t do a De Niro impression,” McHale said at the gala dinner, “but I do an impression of his agent: [mimes picking up a phone] ‘He’ll do it!’”
After his performance, McHale ran into De Niro.
“I was like, ‘Do you want to kill me?’ ” the comedian tells The Post. “He hugged me and said, ‘You had to do what you had to do. I would have done it myself.’”
Christie was equally cool. McHale joked at the dinner, “Governor, do you want bridge jokes or size jokes? I got loads of both. I know you like a combo platter.”
“I later got an e-mail from his office asking me to make a video for another dinner,” McHale says. “I said I would, but that I wasn’t going to pull any punches. They said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’”
The actor, 42, puts comedy a bit on the back burner in “Deliver Us From Evil,” out Wednesday.
The dark police drama finds two detectives (Eric Bana and McHale) teaming with a priest (Edgar Ramírez) to investigate a series of possessions in the Bronx.
The story is loosely (very loosely) based on a memoir by Ralph Sarchie, a former NYPD officer turned demonologist. It was directed by Scott Derrickson, who was just tapped by Marvel to helm the upcoming “Doctor Strange.”
McHale says that after working on the film, he’s a believer.
“After hearing some of the [exorcism] tapes Scott has, yeah, I would say so,” he says. “I heard people that did not sound like human beings. It sounded like someone was holding a cougar down and killing it.”
The role gave the comedian a chance to play an action hero. His character has a big knife fight toward the end of the movie — a scene that was written specifically for McHale because he collects knives in real life.
“I’ve always been fascinated by weapons,” he says. “I have swords and switchblades. It’s the 12-year-old in me that will not stop buying these things. This knife fight was the greatest thing to ever happen to me.”
McHale, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Sarah, and sons Eddie and Isaac, says he’d like to take more dramatic roles in the future — whether they involve knives or not.
One thing holding him back is the fate of “Community,” his NBC sitcom about a group of adults attending a community college.
NBC canned the show in May, but McHale says there’s a chance it might be resurrected online, either via Hulu or Netflix. A movie could potentially follow.
Whether original cast member Chevy Chase will return is up in the air. Chase walked from the show in 2012 after three and half seasons, calling it “the lowest form of television.”
McHale says he still keeps in touch with Chase.
“We will text once in a while,” he says. “There’s a vague, ‘We should get lunch sometime.’ But it’s difficult. We live on different coasts and I have two kids and my schedule is nuts.”
The fate of McHale’s other show, “The Soup,” is less in doubt. He’s up for hosting the weekly comedic rundown of pop-culture news as long as E! will have him.
“It’s with all my friends and we love doing it,” he says. “My contract is up in December, so we’ll see if [the network] wants to do it.”
And despite all the vacancies lately in the late-night TV landscape — as well as a tweeted photo of McHale with CBS honcho Les Moonves — he says he’s never gotten any “formal offers” to jump to another show. The actor’s keeping his calendar open in case “Community” gets picked up, anyway.
Maybe someone could spend seven seconds convincing De Niro to do a guest appearance.