Jim Carrey
Best-Known Comedic Roles: “Ace Ventura,” “Dumb And Dumber” “The Mask”
Best “Serious” Dramatic Turn: “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004)
There are a few candidates for Carrey’s best dramatic performance, but the one that truly always has our hearts (especially that of Oli Lyttelton — read here to understand why) is also director Michel Gondry’s finest feature, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Based on a fabulously dream-logical script by meta genius Charlie Kaufman, the film needs an actor who can ground its flights of sci-fi fancy and visual whimsy in relatable human emotion, and Carrey is unimpeachable on that level, making Joel a kind of everyman and yet also a real character, one we can both identify with and be surprised by. It’s a terrific role as well for anyone wishing to prove themselves as an actor of range, skirting first the highs of love, then the lows and finally the regret and grief and acceptance of love’s end.
Other Dramatic Roles of Note: Carrey had already shown his serious side with an affecting turn in the terrific “The Truman Show” and a soulful portrayal of Andy Kaufman in “Man on the Moon,” both of which earned him Golden Globe nominations. And he was also pretty great in the buried “I Love You Philip Morris” against Ewan MacGregor. Less successfully, he fronted the box-office bomb “The Majestic” for Frank Darabont, the schmaltzy “Simon Birch” and most disastrously, the absolutely dire numerology thriller “The Number 23.”
Robin Williams
Best-Known Comedic Roles: “Mork & Mindy” “Good Morning Vietnam,” “Hook,” “Aladdin,” “Mrs Doubtfire,” “The Birdcage” etc etc
Best “Serious” Dramatic Turn: “Good Will Hunting” (1997)
For obvious reasons, we’ve written a lot about Robin Williams recently. And a fair bit of that has slanted toward his comic persona, from his stand-up to his comedic roles, and the cruel way it contrasted with the sad manner of his death. But like some other names on this list, Williams always had an ability to infuse comedy with pathos and even the most dramatic of roles with notes of humor (“Good Morning Vietnam” for example, is a film most known for Williams’ zaniness, but it is also about war and soldiering, while “The Fisher King” is perhaps our own favorite of these crossover roles is similarly double-edged). But among the more “serious” roles Williams took, the balance of sweet and bitter (where sometimes it could tip over into schmaltz) was perhaps best achieved in “Good Will Hunting.” Partly the kind of inspirational teacher role that Williams had already owned with “Dead Poet’s Society,” he’s just a little more rounded here, providing the film with its considerable heart, but also with a kind of melancholic anger that makes his Dr. Maguire feel real.
Other Dramatic Roles of Note: “Dead Poet’s Society” “Awakenings” and “What Dreams May Come” were on the softer, more uplifting side of serious, while Williams also showed us how thoroughly he could subvert that magical/inspirational vibe with very dark turns in thrillers “Insomnia,” “One Hour Photo” and “The Night Listener,” while “World Greatest Dad” is comedy so pitch black it almost qualifies as drama (and cattily, we could suggest that “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” works the other way round).
Steve Martin
Best-Known Comedic Roles: “Saturday Night Live,” “The Jerk,” “Three Amigos,” “The Man with Two Brains,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” “Parenthood,” “Bowfinger” etc
Best “Serious” Dramatic Turn: “The Spanish Prisoner” (1997)
Okay, okay, keep your hair on, we know “Pennies From Heaven,” widely billed as Martin’s first dramatic role, could well have slotted in here. But with just “The Jerk” as a film role of any note behind him at the time, ‘Pennies’ was less a departure than later serious roles that came after he’d established his comic movie persona in people’s minds. And so we come to David Mamet’s underseen but fun heist thriller “The Spanish Prisoner,” in which Martin, playing a slippery con man of whose real agenda the tricksy plot keeps revealing more and more, feels perfectly at home amid the reversals and clipped stagey dialogue. Probably also memorable because it’s in such a different genre to the kind of tragicomic role that the more serious Martin specializes in elsewhere, not since “Pennies,” for our money, had Martin shown how far he could stray from his comfort zone and still convince.
Other Dramatic Roles of Note: With “Shopgirl,” Martin wrote the story, then adapted it for the screen and starred to pretty good effect, even if the May-December relationship drama still feels a bit like a “Lost In Translation” me-too. He was also good in the uneven “Leap of Faith” and the underrated “Grand Canyon,” while “A Simple Twist of Fate” and “Novocaine” missed the mark.
Peter Sellers
Best-Known Comedic Roles: “The Goon Show” (radio), “The Pink Panther,” “The Ladykillers,” “Casino Royale” (1967), “I’m Alright Jack”
Best “Serious” Dramatic Turn: ”Dr. Strangelove”(1964)/“Being There” (1979)
Argh. More than elsewhere on this list, this is a tough call, not just because Sellers was surely one of the greatest all-rounders of all time, but also because there are comedic elements to even his more dramatic turns and some of his best dramatic work is strictly speaking, black comedy. So “Dr. Strangelove,” one of the greatest black comedies of all time, does feature Sellers on much less zany form than his Inspector Clouseau in any one of his three roles (the famous title role was also prefigured by Sellers’ turn in Kubrick’s “Lolita” two years prior) and it’s just such an amazing feat we had to include it. But we’re splitting the entry with Hal Ashby’s “Being There,” a dramedy in which Sellers’ performance is probably the most soulful and straightest of his career, even if its put in satirical/comedic context. A passion project of Sellers’, based on the Jerzy Kosinski novella, it’s the wry story of a simple minded gardener mistaken for a political genius, but Sellers, in one of his last ever roles, pours a lot more melancholy sweetness into the role than that story suggests, and it remains maybe his most affecting turn.
Other Dramatic Roles of Note: Sellers’ films, as we’ve noted and agonized over, largely fall across the comedy/drama spectrum rather than fitting neatly into one or other box, but those at the more dramatic end included Kubrick’s “Lolita” as well as the two above, while “Never Let Go” was a rare thriller role, that is also unfortunately quite bad.
