9 Times That Comedy Actors Failed At Serious Roles

Last month saw the release of West-meets-East action movie No Escape; however, if you take any stock in the opinions of critics at all, you probably won't be seeing it. Starring Lake Bell, Pierce Brosnan, and - oh yes - comedy star Owen Wilson, the film has been declared Rotten on arrival. If No Escape is significant for anything, for one it's that it marks Pierce Brosnan's latest attempt to kill off any goodwill people still have left over for him for James Bond. More importantly, however, it marks a return to Serious Acting for Owen Wilson, the pretty permanently confused looking surfer dude who's rarely found outside of comedy, and who hasn't done this sort of thing - drama - for years. According to the critics, Wilson's unfortunately bet on the wrong horse, and some have even been so kind to single him out in particular as one of the film's weak links. But he shouldn't be too downhearted, as he's not the only comedy regular who's tried and failed to make a detour into serious performing. Join us as we look at 9 actors who tried their hand at serious roles, and didn't exactly fare too well. 9) Vince Vaughn - True Detective Kicking off with the most recent example of a comedy star failing to prove his serious credentials, it's Owen Wilson's occasional on-screen sidekick Vince Vaughn, mangling dialogue, and acting stiff and morose like it's going out of style. To be fair to Vaughn, he was lumped with the worst of showrunner-writer Nic Pizzolatto's lines in the second season of True Detective, but he still seemed a bit in over his head. The way Vaughn plays gangster Frank Semyon - with an apparent determination to put you to sleep through his flatness - also doesn't help. This is a case of a bad character on the page being compounded by an actor playing it beyond understated, and into dry and uninteresting. Still, Vaughn's apparent bid for late-career dramatic stardom appears to have worked all the same, as Mel Gibson's just cast him in his war movie Hacksaw Ridge. Which means Gibbo probably never saw this gif. 8) Jim Carrey - The Number 23 In his lifetime, Jim Carrey has at his best mastered both comedy and drama. If you've seen him in Eternal Sunshine alone you'll know what power he possesses underneath that often goofy exterior; some might even argue that his performance in that film tops anything he's ever done in comedy (you also have to take into account The Truman Show, and Man on the Moon). The Number 23, however, was a serious career misstep for Carrey. You have to wonder what the actor was doing in the first place when he agreed to star in it - it's a film directed by Joel goddamn Schumacher, about a man who has a phobia of numbers - but for all the film's faults, Carrey doesn't exactly help by playing it so straight and self-serious it comes across as an unintentionally hilarious parody. So, in that sense, it's still a pretty good comedy turn. Unfortunately, though, that wasn't what he was going for. 7) Jack Black - King Kong Early on in his career, Jack Black took a host of bit-parts in dramatic movies, including the likes of Dead Man Walking and Enemy of the State. After he broke out with comedy, however, coming to the fore after Richard Linklater's School of Rock, a fresh-off-the-Lord-of-the-Rings Peter Jackson decided to hand Black his first ever dramatic leading role, in King Kong. The results, unfortunately, were not good. It's obvious that Jackson hired Black for his energy and innate affability - characteristics that would make the pretty odious Carl Denham more tolerable - but while Black's schtick works in his comedy roles, in King Kong it just comes across as false. And when he's ultra-sincerely spouting lines like, "It wasn't the airplanes...it was beauty killed the beast," it almost seems like he forgot he wasn't starring in a spoof. The effects have dated rather badly in King Kong, but Black still remains the most disagreeable thing about it ten years on. 6) Eddie Izzard - Valkyrie Everyone in Valkyrie is very serious about killing Hitler. You can tell that by the fact that they stare intensely into each others' eyes during conversations, speak with the utmost conviction at all times, and never - under any circumstance - even think about cracking a smile. This is the kind of film that Eddie Izzard - a freewheeling stand-up who likes to improvise whole shows and dress in drag while he's doing it - really shouldn't have been cast in. And yet, there Izzard is in Valkyrie, in the role of a German officer assisting Tom Cruise's would-be assassin. Like everyone else in the film, Izzard's required to temper down his natural warmth (he is playing a Nazi, after all - director Bryan Singer seems to assume even the ones who tried to assassinate the Fuhrer had no soul) and deliver stale dialogue like it's Shakespeare. While the other more seasoned dramatic actors fare relatively well, for Izzard it's obviously an uphill struggle. He makes a one-eyed Cruise look like the best actor alive in comparison. 5) Ashton Kutcher - Jobs Making this list on a technicality more than anything else, nobody is claiming Ashton Kutcher is any kind of great comedian. But the fact is he's been a comedy star for years now, bringing in some of the biggest comedy gig paychecks for both TV and film ever since he started out on That '70s Show almost two decades ago. Arguably the funniest thing he's ever done, though, is try and break into serious acting by playing the titan that is Apple's Steve Jobs. In fairness to Kutcher, he looks the part in Joshua Michael Stern's Jobs (a hell of a lot more-so than Michael Fassbender does in Danny Boyle's upcoming Steve Jobs). But physical resemblance and mimicry of body language alone cannot carry someone through a movie, especially not when the actor playing the part appears so incapable of suggesting depth. In a way, it's a perfect summation of Kutcher: outwardly the package is impressive, but inside there appears to be nothing going on at all. 4) Will Ferrell - Melinda and Melinda In his later years, Woody Allen hasn't exactly been consistent. There'll be middling films, there'll be bombs, and every so often there'll be movies which - through some mad alchemy - he manages to get just right. Melinda and Melinda falls somewhere in the middle, a mixed bag, with one glaring element sticking out as a major weakness: Will Ferrell trying to play the Woody Allen part, and failing. It's not that Ferrell doesn't try hard; it's just that Melinda and Melinda requires him to be himself as well a Woody Allen imitator, only he ends up being a pale imitation of both. Ferrell just doesn't have the dramatic chops to pull it off. In straight comedy he can be a genius; in Melinda and Melinda he's whiny, nervy, and more than a little irritating. Like Woody Allen then, only minus the nuance Allen brings to his neurotic nerd routine. 3) Cameron Diaz - The Counselor Much like Ashton Kutcher, Cameron Diaz isn't many peoples' idea of a great comedian, but the fact is she's been a comedy mainstay for over two decades, ever since breaking out in The Mask back in 1994. As a comedy actress, Diaz is a rarity in that she appears to be almost critic-proof: no one in the press liked The Other Woman or Bad Teacher, but they made hundreds of millions at the box office all the same. Diaz occasionally makes an exception and tackles a straight role, but nowhere is she more stupefyingly dreadful than in Ridley Scott's The Counselor. Regardless of what you think of the film (to some, it's a cult gem; to others, it's just a hot mess), there's no arguing that Diaz is entirely out of her depth facing off against the likes of Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, and Penelope Cruz. Throughout, it looks as though she's trying to compensate for her shortcomings; her solution is to do drama with a capital 'D,' and devour scenery like there's no tomorrow. 2) Adam Sandler - Men, Women & Children For the majority of Jason Reitman's Men, Women & Children, Adam Sandler does serious acting the only way he knows how: by rolling out the old sadsack manchild routine and hoping it'll pass as a performance. It's an ensemble film (a fairly hamfisted one at that), which means, thankfully for Sandler, there's not much room for the inexplicably popular star to embarrass himself. In the few moments Sandler actually gets to do something, though, he neglects to deliver something worthy, as in Punch-Drunk Love, another serious (kinda) film that features his one great performance. Instead, like a sulky teenager, in Men, Women & Children he just mopes. And when he isn't moping, he's delivering Reitman's words with all the enthusiasm of someone who wishes he was just back on one of his comedy sets, getting paid millions of dollars to make fart jokes. 1) Vince Vaughn - Psycho Just because Vince Vaughn appears twice in this list doesn't mean he's the worst example of a comedy star trying his hand at serious acting. In fact, the two examples here aside, he's been pretty solid - in Into the Wild especially, but also in Thumbsucker, Return to Paradise, and yes, even Steven Spielberg's The Lost World, a film in which the director apparently paid more attention to his fake dinosaurs' performances than his actors'. But nobody - nobody - gets away from Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake clean. And Vaughn, out of all the actors who shouldn't have been there doing a pointless shot-for-shot remake in the first place, is the absolute worst. Playing Norman Bates with all the skill of an amateur after-school theatre player, Vaughn is so bad, you understand why he retreated almost exclusively into comedy not long after the film's release. One can only speculate that it was the guilt of making Anthony Perkins spin in his grave that did it.