It’s shocking enough when comedians like Robin Williams and Steve Carrell manage to shed their funnyman persona and deliver knockout dramatic performances in films like Good Will Hunting and Foxcatcher, respectively. But just as impressive is when actors known for their onscreen gravitas pull a reversal and manage to make the audience laugh by playing the fool every once in a while. And frankly, it's borderline unfair that some of Hollywood's best-looking, most-respected stars just happen to be funny too.
Vote up the best funny serious actors who made you laugh just as much as those who specialize in comedy.
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The tragic loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman to addiction didn't only deprive us of his intense, unique ability to inhabit the personalities of tortured souls and complex characters in films like Magnolia and Capote. We've also been deprived of watching his less celebrated but equally skilled capacity for playing eccentric kooks in comedies. His supporting character of Sandy "Sasquatch Basketball" Lyle was one of the few redeeming factors in the Ben Stiller/Jennifer Aniston rom-com Along Came Polly.
More enduringly, his participation in the Coen Brothers masterpiece The Big Lebowski as Brandt, personal assistant to Lebowski (the big one), will ensure that his comedy chops will endure just as long as his more serious endeavors.
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After much of the world’s population collectively swooned as the shirtless Brad Pitt sexed it up in 1991’s Thelma and Louise, you could have been forgiven for thinking he was merely a ridiculously good-looking dude with little in the way of real talent. Yet he ended up evolving into an A-lister’s A-lister, mostly appearing in films with a serious tone. However, it was a comedic role - the quotably manic Jeffrey Goines in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys - that landed him his first Oscar nomination.
Since turning heads in that role (for which Pitt prepared by spending significant time at a psychiatric hospital), he's shown himself to have reached certifiably god-level in comedy, from his turn as an unintelligible bare-knuckle boxer in Snatch to the dopey gym rat in the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading. In regard to the latter, he was hailed for his bravery in playing "a character that dismantles Pitt's star power by destroying it."
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- Avengers: Endgame
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
It was a bold maneuver indeed to transform the steely-eyed, grim-visaged God of Thunder from the first movies in the Thor franchise into a wise-cracking goofball in Thor: Ragnarok. And turning him into a disheveled drunkard in Avengers: Endgame would have surely made most good-looking actors balk. But Chris Hemsworth loved the idea of his character looking like a grubby burnout so much that he fought against a return to his chiseled, lord of the (non-alcoholic) six-packs look in favor of keeping his character a sad mead-guzzler throughout the film.
Dealing with the required prosthetics wasn't easy, as Hemsworth explained: "People just kept coming up and cuddling me like a big bear or rubbing my belly like I was pregnant. Or trying to sit on my lap like I was Santa Claus. And then you get sick of it when people come up and grab your belly."
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Rosemary Clooney’s nephew has come a long way from playing a handyman on The Facts of Life in the 1980s. Nowadays, he likes to occupy himself with simultaneously directing, producing, and starring in moving, thoughtful films, but George isn't so bad at the comedy game either. And the projects he chooses to be funny in aren't of the rubber-faced, slapstick variety, as he's managed to be in critically acclaimed productions like O Brother, Where Art Thou, Hail Caesar! and Burn After Reading - all of which were Coen Brothers movies, incidentally enough.
So, he might want to keep that partnership going and avoid unintentional comedy in nipple-tastic debacles like Batman & Robin.
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For the guy who burst on the scene in movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, then scared the next generation of theatergoers in The Untouchables and Goodfellas, who would have thought the twilight stage of his career would be so notable for his ability to get audiences to laugh? Yet Robert De Niro gave us plenty of unexpected silliness in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. And playing a former CIA official who's intrinsically suspicious of Ben Stiller's nurse with the unfortunate name of Greg Focker in Meet the Parents has become one of De Niro's most memorable roles.
It was definitely a profitable career choice, but he should probably quit while he's ahead and stay away from a fourth installment. Unless, of course, he can't resist the (rather easy) challenge of beating Little Fockers' 9% Rotten Tomatoes approval rating.
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Russell Crowe is pretty far down the list when filmmakers go looking for funny guys to be in their movies. But when director Shane Black offered him the chance to work alongside Ryan Gosling in the action-comedy The Nice Guys, both actors immediately jumped at the chance to work with one another and things just fell into place.
Granted, Crowe didn't exactly do pratfalls and spit takes or anything like that. He basically played a curmudgeonly tough guy, as is his custom. However, he did get to deliver some beautiful one-liners, such as this galactically cynical observation on the institution of matrimony: "Marriage is buying a house for someone you hate."
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Gene Hackman gained fame by being able to play pretty much every sort of role imaginable during his illustrious and decades-long career. Well, except for comedy, that is. People don't generally associate the man behind Popeye Doyle in The French Connection or Mississippi Burning's Agent Rupert Anderson with chuckles or snorts. (Yes, he did seem to have fun being ridiculous in the 1978 Superman, but that wasn't exactly the intended effect.)
However, keep in mind he was in comedy legend Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein all the way back in 1974. And 27 years later, he gave us arguably the funniest character in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, as a terrible and selfish patriarch who thinks it's perfectly appropriate to express sympathy for the passing of a loved one by saying: "I'm very sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman."
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Not every Leonardo DiCaprio/Martin Scorsese collaboration is an intense, dark and/or serious affair. In The Wolf of Wall Street, the legendary director gave DiCaprio the opportunity to let loose as a morally deficient stockbroker and win a Golden Globe while doing it. And in an even more prestigious accomplishment, he helped the film set the Guinness World Record for most profanity in a single film.
Finally, the respected thespian who was kicked off the set of Romper Room (for running around like a wild animal and hitting the camera) when he was just 5 years old was given the opportunity to unleash the naughty brat that dwelled within. The Quaaludes scene alone was practically enough to cement him as a genius of physical comedy.
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- Barbie
- Warner Bros.
Thankfully, just because Ryan Gosling's acting career began with appearances in the Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark? TV series, that didn't serve as an omen that he'd be forever doomed to play dark characters like the replicant "K" in Blade Runner 2049, or deliver a series of steely gazes in Nicolas Winding Refn movies.
Despite that particular trademark, Gosling has garnered some of his highest acclaim when he breaks that steely-gazed mold and, frankly, makes a fool of himself. For starters, he played the sole lead in Lars and the Real Girl, a film about a nerdy sweater-wearing guy who develops a (platonic) relationship with a rubber sex doll. If there's any way to shatter the possibility of being pigeonholed as a guy who takes himself too seriously, that would be it.
He reached even greater comedic heights in 2016 as he managed to make his 1970s private eye character of Holland March the funniest part of Shane Black's The Nice Guys (not to denigrate Russell Crowe's services, which are also recognized here elsewhere). And in 2023, he took those comic gifts to even bolder self-effacing heights in Greta Gerwig's smash-hit Barbie. Gosling bring a vulnerable absurdity and bright-eyed optimism to the role of Ken, the Barbie-whipped would-be love interest who brings patriarchy to Barbieland… but mainly because he thinks patriarchy is about horses.
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For a guy who began his career playing "Gorgeous Guy at Bar" in the '90s TV series Ally McBeal, Jon Hamm has proven he can do a whole lot more than just sit around looking chiseled. He proved that he can also be funny on television, with his participation in 30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and numerous appearances on Saturday Night Live. Hamm's film career has veered more toward the dramatic side, but that doesn't mean he can't get the audiences rolling there as well.
He doesn't care about taking credit for it either. In the acclaimed Paul Feig-directed Bridesmaids, in which he hilariously plays Kristen Wiig's casual fling, Hamm chose to keep his name (which, at the time, was primarily associated with Mad Men) off the cast list in order to help the film succeed as a comedy.
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Younger readers may not realize that before he was delivering gut-wrenching, hard-hitting performances in features such as Dead Man Walking and Mystic River, Sean Penn began his career as a pot-loving surfer dude in the teen comedy classic, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It's hard to imagine any other actor his age being able to bring the character of Jeff Spicoli to life in such a lovably hilarious way, and his mannerisms and quotes remain iconic to this day.
Not to mention how he taught an entire generation the nuances of American history with informative soliloquies like, "So what Jefferson was saying was, 'Hey! You know, we left this England place because it was bogus. So if we don't get some cool rules ourselves, pronto, we'll just be bogus too.' Yeah?"
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Since playing a Southie with a gift for solving math problems, Matt Damon has been an action hero in the Bourne franchise, an astronaut in The Martian, and an undercover gangster in The Departed (among a ton of other roles). Every now and again he can also embody the personality of a dork and/or a goober, which he showed the world when he played a pudgy whistleblower in The Informant! and a moronic lawman in True Grit.
In the latter, he took special glee in throwing his smart, tough persona to the wind, sounding a bit like the Team America: World Police version of himself (with a larger vocabulary) when he proclaimed: "I am a true nincompoop in this movie."
Surprisingly funny?Nowadays, many people think of Amy Adams as a successful dramatic actor from her "fierce woman" roles in films like The Master and The Fighter, but it took a lot of hard work and determination to avoid being typecast early in her career as the "naïve girl with a cheerful personality." Not that such roles are inherently inferior, since, as she herself put it: "Naïveté is not stupidity, and innocent people are often very complex."
Indeed, no one can argue that she wasn't perfect for the role of Giselle in Disney’s Enchanted, in which she played a hopeful, optimistic, yet innocent princess from a fairy tale land. This movie proved she could be funny (just as she was in her debut performance in Drop Dead Gorgeous), which surely helped prevent her from being cast as ditzy cheerleaders into her 80s.
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We’ll never know how high River Phoenix’s acting career would have rocketed if he hadn't passed at such an early age. But luckily we still have his brother Joaquin to carry on his legacy - and whose own filmography is about as impressive as it gets. He's not really known for being funny, however, and while he delivered an Oscar-winning performance in a film called Joker, there really weren't a whole lot of actual jokes to be found there.
But true fans know he is indeed a capable comedic performer, as demonstrated in lesser-known movies like Inherent Vice and The Sisters Brothers. Not to mention his goofy, tinfoil hat-wearing turn in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, which sure had to be great practice for his even goofier 2010 antics in advance of the faux-documentary I’m Still Here.
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There's probably no type of role that Cate Blanchett can't believably pull off, and that includes the comical. While she's the perfect choice whenever you're looking for someone to play an elven queen, a British queen, or a British queen twice, she's also more than capable of lip-syncing Bonnie Tyler's "I Need a Hero" while using a kitchen faucet as a microphone, as she did in Barry Levinson's 2001 crime comedy Bandits.
As Betty Jo Tucker of ReelTalk movie reviews puts it, in a movie about thieves starring Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton, Blanchett "steals this comedy right from under their noses."
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A lot of people probably thought the kid from Donnie Darko might turn out to be the type of actor who moped around in independent films exclusively, turning down lucrative offers in favor of experimental projects in order to be more true to his "craft." But lo and behold, Jake Gyllenhaal ended up joining the A-list ranks, appearing in everything from Oscar-winning dramas about goat herding cowboys with a secret to massive superhero franchises.
He's even shown he can make audiences laugh by playing a wacky TV zoologist in Okja and by participating in a send-up of old-timey children's television in John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch. There doesn't seem to be much Gyllenhaal can't do - except maybe play a character who doesn't have big ol' crazy eyes.
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