Call it contrarianism, but in a week when the marketing for “Suicide Squad” is simply begging us to find it daring, edgy and otherwise mind-blowing, the film that really stopped us in our tracks has been “Nine Lives.” Fine, David Ayer‘s tentpole comic book adaptation has Will Smith playing a (somewhat) bad guy for more or less the first time, but “Nine Lives” has Kevin Spacey, two-time Oscar winner and Artistic Director of the Old Vic Theater in London for a decade, playing a man who gets trapped inside the body of a cat called Mr. Fluffypants. What. The. Fuck.
Now, we haven’t yet seen the Barry Sonnenfeld movie, so maybe it’s a masterpiece. But its plot sounds like literally every single supernatural/body swap movie ever made: a workaholic tycoon Dad visits a mystical pet store and is magicked into a cat’s body with only a week to reconcile with his family or he’ll stay a cat forever. And the other cast members are veterans of this overpopulated subgenre: Jennifer Garner starred in the admittedly great “13 Going on 30,” while Christopher Walken seems to be playing exactly the same role that he did in Adam Sandler‘s “Click,” to the point that we have to keep checking that this isn’t some sort of sequel. Hang on. Yup, nope, just checked again. It isn’t.
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Anyway, seeing the man who has been Frank Underwood, Lester Burnham, John Doe, Jack Vincennes and many more turn his talents to the challenges presented by the role of Mr. Fluffypants has not been the only eyebrow-raising casting news of late. We just heard about Channing Tatum playing a merman in a gender-swapped “Splash” remake; Helen Mirren has signed on for duty in the eighth “Fast and Furious” movie, and indeed Daniel “Harry Potter” Radcliffe has only just farted his way out of theaters as the flatulent corpse in “Swiss Army Man.” Sometimes a role sounds like a bad idea, sometimes it feels simply outrageous, other times it’s clearly a paycheck gig, and for still others it’s a bid for credibility, but almost all actors worth their salt have at some point done something completely unexpected (and if they haven’t, maybe they should: you only win big if you’re willing to roll the dice). Here are ten actors we admire, and their most WTF roles.
Gary Oldman – “Tiptoes” (2004)
Over the course of 80-odd famously eclectic, wide-ranging credits, it is inevitable that Oldman’s had a few dodgy moments. But that can’t account for the decision to play a dwarf in this painfully ill-conceived and possibly even more painfully well-intentioned Matthew Bright “issues dramedy.” Starring amid a glossy cast including Matthew McConaughey, Kate Beckinsale, Patricia Arquette and Peter Dinklage, Oldman plays Rolfe, the dwarf brother of McConaughy’s character Steven, who is dating Beckinsale’s Carol without ever telling her that he is the only average-sized person in his family. When Carol becomes pregnant, Steven reveals his secret, and when she continues to want the baby against his wishes, she turns to his twin brother Rolfe to teach her about dwarfism and its challenges. Here’s the thing: despite the saccharine plotting, Oldman is actually very good, and his scenes with McConaughey especially are affecting, but only if you can drown out that side of your brain that’s screaming “this is the dwarf equivalent of blackface!” Why on earth would any self-respecting actor take a role in a film designed to portray dwarfism in a non-patronizing manner, and then have the main dwarf played (at considerable makeup and special effect expense) by not-a-dwarf? When you have Peter Dinklage right there? Going straight to DVD in the U.S. after its Sundance premiere was greeted with tumbleweeds (apart from the sound of a hundred publicists handing in their resignations), “Tiptoes” has at the very least gifted the universe with one of those YouTube trailers from which you can derive hours of fun watching friends and family try to comprehend that this is a real thing, and not some sort of parody trailer for a joke film no one would ever be nuts enough to actually make.
Judi Dench – “The Chronicles Of Riddick” (2004)
Now a man with 100 million Facebook fans and the driving force of “The Fast & The Furious,” the most surprisingly enduring franchise in film history, Vin Diesel is on the surface a macho, man’s-man action star, right down to the fact that his name is Vin Diesel. But as we all do, Diesel contains multitudes: he’s both an unashamed “Dungeons & Dragons”-loving geek and a fan of great theater actresses of an older generation. Long before he got Helen Mirren in “Fast & Furious 8,” when his career first exploded and he was first headlining blockbusters, Diesel united his interests and somehow persuaded Oscar-winner Dame Judi Dench to play a role in “The Chronicles Of Riddick.” A legit box-office draw now more than ever at the age of 81, Dench doesn’t have many franchise/tentpoles on her CV outside of her involvement in the ‘James Bond‘ films. But Diesel had his heart set on Dench to join him in the big-budget “Pitch Black” sequel, and, as she said last year, the actor “came to see me at the Haymarket Theatre and sent me a bouquet of flowers that they couldn’t get up the stairs… you can’t say no to a man like that.” Dench plays Aereon, an Air Elemental who serves in her limited screen time as a sort of Gandalf-like figure to Diesel’s increasingly sanitized space-badass. Rendered semi-transparent by visual effects (which feels like a metaphor for something), Dench does what she was hired for and provides some gravitas to the impenetrable babble that makes up most of the script. But she clearly isn’t having much fun. “I’ve never watched it and I don’t think many other people have,” she would later tell an interviewer.
Al Pacino – “Jack & Jill” (2011)
Though you could perhaps argue that he stayed consistently watchable longer than contemporary Robert De Niro —he was giving great performances in films like “Donnie Brasco,” “The Insider” and “Insomnia” as late as the turn of the century— Pacino’s career of late has been marked by some shocking lows and transparent paycheck gigs, movies like “88 Minutes,” the recent “Misconduct” and De Niro team-up “Righteous Kill.” But probably the most baffling choice he’s made, even more than his cameo in “Gigli,” was to take a supporting role in an Adam Sandler movie. “Jack & Jill” sees Sandler play dual roles, as a hapless ad exec called, yes, Jack, and as his loud, obnoxious twin sister Jill. It’s a brutally unwatchable film, almost universally considered one of the worst films of 2011, littered with lousy, time-filling cameos (Shaquille O’Neal! John McEnroe! Uh, Johnny Depp! Oh god, Jared Fogle!) and bad even by Sandler’s standards. But as demeaning as it is to see Pacino in the film —playing himself and aggressively courting Jill— he’s easily the best thing in it. Sometimes, when reduced to a paycheck gig like this, an actor is visibly slumming (see, or preferably don’t, Nicole Kidman in the same year’s “Just Go With It”), but Pacino follows in the footsteps of Sandler buddies Steve Buscemi and John Turturro by utterly committing to it and rolling with the indignities forced on him. He’s playing it with the intensity of anything else he does, and is so sincere he actually manages to make you laugh in a bleak wilderness. If we’re perfectly honest, it’s probably better than some of his other recent performances.
Frances McDormand – “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon” (2011)
If the “Transformers” franchise has achieved anything positive in the world — and not to spoil things too much, but it hasn’t really — it’s given a lot of big-money paychecks to a lot of deserving, long-standing character actors. Across the four movies, people like Hugo Weaving, John Goodman, Kevin Dunn, Julie White, John Turturro, Bernie Mac, John Benjamin Hickey, Rainn Wilson, John Malkovich, Alan Tudyk, Stanley Tucci and Titus Welliver have all been able to pay off mortgages, or at least take a holiday, thanks to Michael Bay’s noisy toy franchise. But perhaps the most unlikely to have taken the Decepticon dollar is Frances McDormand. The great Oscar-winning actress has maintained a remarkably credible career across the last three decades. The closest she came to blockbuster territory was “Darkman” (yes, a superhero movie, but a weird, cult-y one long before the boom, and directed by her former roommate Sam Raimi), and “Aeon Flux” (a disaster, but an interesting, feminist-tinged disaster). And yet there she was in 2011 as Charlotte Mearing, Director of National Intelligence, a vaguely benign, sometimes threatening authority figure who, as is true of most of the adults in “Transformers” movie, is there mostly to frown at screens, or look up and try and have a conversation with a tennis ball on a pole that will later be turned into Optimus Prime. It’s a nothing part, and McDormand can only do so much to elevate it, but it’s hard to resent her, given that she says it’s the only time she’s been paid her going rate. “I worked very hard for that money,” she said at Cannes in 2015. “I’m very proud of my work. I’m glad I did that film and I’m proud that I finally got paid what I was told I was worth by the industry. But that is nothing. That is a tenth of what most males my age, with my experience and my reputation as a film actor make. We’ve never been paid commensurately and that has to change.”
Sean Penn – “I Am Sam” (2001)/“This Must Be The Place” (2011)
It’s easy to dislike Sean Penn – his shoutiness, his humorlessness, how badly written his El Chapo interview was, a recent run of awful performances, “The Last Face.” But you have to give him credit at least for zigging when he could zag, making bold choices and swinging for the fences, even if the swing often ends up with him face down in the mud with his pants around his ankles and a stadium full of people laughing at him. You could pick a number of odd choices from his career (most recently a cameo in “The Angry Birds Movie” as a character who only grunts), but two in particular stand out. 2001’s incredibly awful “I Am Sam” sees the actor star as a developmentally-disabled man battling for custody of his daughter (Dakota Fanning) with the help of a cynical lawyer (Michelle Pfeiffer). It’s well-meaning stuff, clearly, but also thunderingly wrong-headed, with Penn giving an almost impossibly condescending, deeply caricatured performance later mocked in “Tropic Thunder” (which Penn cameos in, so we assume he was a good sport about it at least). The turn shares some DNA with a later, equally puzzling (though far more enjoyable) choice of role, as a rock star in Paolo Sorrentino’s “This Must Be The Place.” Buried under make-up, a great big Robert Smith-ish mop of hair, and under a quiet, half-mumbly voice that makes him feel as much like an old lady as a music legend, it’s just one messy element of a chaotically broken movie. But as uneven and ill-conceived as Sorrentino’s film is, Penn’s actually really compelling in it, and unlike “I Am Sam” is very much in on the joke.