Kristen Wiig
Best-Known Comedic Roles: “Saturday Night Live,” “Bridesmaids,” “Paul,” “Macgruber” “Anchorman 2,” this
Best “Serious” Dramatic Turn: “The Skeleton Twins” (2014)
Again a comic actor who’s adept at investing a kind of heartfelt misfit quality into even serious roles, Wiig has shown a laudable desire since becoming everyone’s favorite person ever with “Bridesmaids” to change it up in her choice of movies. But that desire to branch out hasn’t really borne fruit till this year’s Sundance Film Festival, when “The Skeleton Twins,” which stars fellow ‘SNL’ alum and “Paul” co-star Bill Hader, played to strong notices and picked up the U.S. dramatic Screenwriting award. Wiig and Hader play an estranged brother/sister duo both going through some fairly serious crises, who reconnect, albeit often painfully, and find a kind of healing in each other — which is about as Sundance-by-numbers as it gets. But it is marked out by Wiig and Hader’s gently powerful turns, along with those from Luke Wilson and Ty Burrell, all of whom prove the adage that comic actors can successfully turn their hand to drama maybe more easily than dramatic actors can attempt comedy.
Other Dramatic Roles of Note: Wiig also acquitted herself well in her first attempt at serious drama, “Hateship Loveship,” though the film is a little bland to be memorable, while she also took a small voice role as “sexykitten” in Spike Jonze’s “Her.”
Ben Stiller
Best Known Comedic Roles: “There’s Something About Mary,” “Meet The Parents,” “Zoolander,” “Dodgeball,” “Starsky & Hutch,” “Night At The Museum”
Best “Serious” Dramatic Turn: “Permanent Midnight” (1998)
Stiller’s moved back and forth between comedy and drama more effectively than most, even when you exclude dramedies like “The Royal Tenenbaums” or “Greenberg.” Probably his purest dramatic experience came early on his career, wtih David Veloz’s “Permanent Midnight,” which if more people had seen might have altered the path of his career. Stiller stars as real-life screenwriter Jerry Stahl (who penned episodes of “ALF,” “Bad Boys II” and “Hemingway and Gellhorn,” among others), who came to LA and fell in with an addict buddy (Owen Wilson), leading to escalating series of addictions culminating in heroin and crack. The film itself sometimes crudely written, and occasionally miscast (hi, Elizabeth Hurley as Stahl’s wife!). But it’s worth watching just for Stiller’s performance, which channels his trademark nervy neuroticism, but adds a level of drug-addled confidence and even sex appeal that’s not necessarily present in the rest of the director’s work. It’s an impressively strung-out, sweaty turn that’s still something of an anomaly in the Stiller canon.
Other Dramatic Roles Of Note: Stiller made his debut in Spielberg’s “Empire Of The Sun,” and the same year as “Permanent Midnight” also starred in Neil LaBute’s dark and acerbic “Your Friends & Neighbors.” He’s also very good in the chronically underseen mystery “Zero Effect,” and in the aforementioned films by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.
Albert Brooks
Best Known Comedic Roles: “Real Life,” “Modern Romance,” “Lost In America,” “Broadcast News,” “Defending Your Life,” “Finding Nemo,” “This Is 40”
Best “Serious” Dramatic Turn: “Drive” (2011)
As far back as directorial debut “Real Life” (or even his early SNL shorts), Brooks has always included an element of drama with his comedy, and it’s perhaps telling that smart directors have long been deploying him in straight roles to great effect. But his most atypical and unexpectedly terrifying role is undoubtedly in Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive.” The cuddly-ish Brooks, who’d been mostly absent from screens for a long while before the film opened, is hardly obvious casting for a subtly malevolent gangster with a rage issue, but Brooks is spectacular. It’s a slow-burn, with Brooks setting up his Bernie Rose as a sort of potential rival father figure to Ryan Gosling’s Driver, before letting the mask slip and the psychopath underneath show his true face. Perhaps most impressive of all is that you find Brooks a real physical threat here, the pure viciousness on his face as he stabs an underling in the throat proving to be genuinely haunting.
Other Dramatic Roles Of Note: Brooks is always great and always plays his comedy with a degree of reality (see “Modern Romance” and “Broadcast News” for the best examples), but he’s also terrific when playing it straight: in Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” in Soderbergh’s “Out Of Sight,” or in the imminent “A Most Violent Year.”
Lily Tomlin
Best-Known Comedic Roles: ”Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” “All of Me,” “The Incredible Shrinking Woman,” ”9 to 5” “Big Business,” “Eastbound and Down,” “I Heart Huckabees” “Eastbound & Down” that video from the set of “I Heart Huckabees”
Best “Serious” Dramatic Turn: “Nashville” (1975)
Tomlin’s collaboration with Robert Altman only spanned four films, but as far as her dramatic feature roles go, it’s hard to think about her without also thinking of Robert Altman. And “Nashville,” his wonderful ensemble musical about 5 days in the lives and loves of a group of country music performers leading up to a political rally, was in fact Tomlin’s first big-screen role. However, she was already well known from her TV work which had established her as the comedic force behind several beloved characters and skits on the massively popular ‘Laugh-In’ that often then went on to get their own specials. But what’s remarkable about “Nashville” is that her role is among the less humorous in the ensemble, and Tomlin herself has said: “I wanted Barbara Harris’s part because it had more comedic undertones. But then… I realized how great [Altman’s] casting was. He just had a gift for it. [I thought,] ‘I must be more right for this part than I think I am.’” Indeed Tomlin was so right for the part she got, and deserved, an Oscar nomination her very first time at bat.
Other Dramatic Roles of Note: “Short Cuts,” “The Player” (cameo), “A Prairie Home Companion,” but maybe her most impressive dramatic work recently has been on TV with recurring roles on “The West Wing,”and “Damages” that make the most of her uniquely spiky presence.
