Stealing is usually a crime – but not when an actor, supposedly a few rungs down the pecking order, swipes a movie out from under the nose of the film’s star. There is something hugely inspiring about an underdog seizing the moment and making it their own. It benefits the film, too, as it forces the A-lister at the top of the bill to raise their game and typically leads to a better experience all around.
Grab some popcorn, shut the curtains and put your feet up as we bring you some of the best recent (ish) examples of supporting actors who outshine the stars.
Paul Bettany in A Knight’s Tale
Paul Bettany was an obscure former street performer when he was cast as a comedic, gambling-addicted Geoffrey Chaucer opposite a red-hot Heath Ledger in the feel-good medieval romp A Knight’s Tale.
Even making it to the screen had been a battle against the odds for the unknown Bettany. The studio hadn’t wanted him as the deadpan bard and agreed only when director Brian Helgeland threatened to pull the plug on the entire project, taking Ledger with him. The director, who was pretty hot himself, having written the script for LA Confidential, had a hunch that Bettany could bring something to A Knight’s Tale as Ledger’s ye olde hypeman. He was proved right in spectacular fashion. Introduced naked and covered in mud (following a run-in with bandits), Bettany adds a hilarious zing to this tale of honour and destiny and steals the thunder of the stoic and reserved Ledger.
Streaming on Channel 4
Ryan Gosling in Barbie
Greta Gerwig used Barbie to smuggle a message about the evil and stupidity of patriarchy into the multiplex. Yet she may not have reckoned on Gosling’s Ken, and his descent into cartoon machismo, giving the movie its comedic and emotional power. To her credit, Margot Robbie sparkles as the eponymous plastic plaything – but Gosling owns the film.
The scene in which he and his bros sit around blustering about The Godfather is both funny and insightful and is turbo-charged by Gosling’s laid-back charisma. This is what men get up to when they are together – talking nonsense and sounding like idiots. The dialogue certainly rings truer than the many saccharine and on-the-nose speeches that clog the script’s final third. Ahead of Barbie, there had been grumblings that 40-something Gosling was too old for the part: whatever else Ken is, he isn’t middle-aged. But such was his charm, all objections melted away like moulded plastic in a heatwave.
Streaming on Prime Video
Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting
Good Will Hunting was written by its boyish stars, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and their youthful energy drives the film forward. But it needs a jot of wisdom and sadness to offset their apple-cheeked exuberance and that is what the melancholic Williams brings as the therapist who encourages Damon’s character to grow beyond his impetuousness and fully utilise his genius at maths.
A movie about two men in the springtime of their lives is made so much richer by Williams’ autumnal ennui – whenever he is on screen, a quirky indie comedy becomes searing and profound. That Williams was the real star of the film was acknowledged at the Oscars, where he was named Best Supporting Actor (while Damon and Affleck won for Best Original Screenplay).
Streaming on Netflix and Paramount+
Viola Davis in Doubt
The then-obscure character actress has just 10 minutes of screen time as the mother of the only black boy attending a Catholic school in Boston, where a priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has taken a potentially unhealthy interest in him. But she goes toe-to-toe with Meryl Streep’s matriarchal Sister Aloysius and her restraint burns with an authenticity that elevates her above her broader and more demonstrative co-star.
Davis holds the screen while quietly explaining that her son is gay and that he would be beaten to death by his violent father should the truth ever come out. She never raises her voice, but the lines land with a roaring power: it is a masterclass in minimalism that deservedly earned her an Oscar.
Streaming on Paramount+
Jamie Lee Curtis in Everything Everywhere All At Once
This wacky movie about a bored and disillusioned laundromat owner (Michelle Yeoh) who cycles through the lives she could be living in the infinite multiverse is elevated by Curtis’ finely judged absurdity as a tax office bureaucrat whose behaviour becomes increasingly Kafkaesque and bizarre across the many planes of existence. Everyone else in Everything Everywhere plays their parts with a sincerity that verges on cloying. Curtis, who deservedly bagged an Oscar, overshadows them with her surreal comic energy.
Available to buy or rent on Prime Video, Curzon, Sky Store and Apple TV
Alan Rickman in Die Hard
Just turned 40, Rickman had never previously appeared in a movie when he was cast as the deadpan villain Hans Gruber in the original Die Hard. The film features one of the great all-time action hero performances by Bruce Willis as the bloodied, bruised and browbeaten John McClane. But from the moment Gruber, in his devastatingly dapper business-casual suit, strides purposefully on to the screen, Die Hard belongs to him. He’s the baddie you can’t help rooting for – with great hair, impeccable manners and a plan (to access an impenetrable safe by hoodwinking the police into shutting down the electricity in the entire city block) that actually makes sense.
Streaming on Disney+
Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight
Batman always had the best villains – from Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns to Liam Neeson’s Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins. But all were overshadowed by Ledger’s terrifying reinvention of the Joker – previously synonymous with a wisecracking Jack Nicholson – as an agent of pure chaos. Ledger drew inspiration from the nightmare art of Francis Bacon and Malcolm McDowell’s portrayal of a dystopian hooligan in A Clockwork Orange, to which he brought his own dark energy.
By all accounts, the performance took a lot out of the sensitive Ledger. He gave us one of the greatest comic book bad guys ever and cast a shadow over Christian Bale, the Dark Knight himself.
Streaming on ITVX
Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids
Like a comedic firecracker chucked through an open window, McCarthy’s gleeful performance in Bridesmaids gave this meditation on love and friendship a jolt of pure silliness. Improvising most of her dialogue, McCarthy blazed a hilarious trail as the out-of-control sister-in-law of Maya Rudolph’s bride-to-be. You never knew what was going to happen when she opened her mouth, and, by all accounts, neither did she. Excellent but more studied performances by stars Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne (as rivals for the friendship of Rudolph’s character) could not compete with McCarthy’s wrecking ball energy.
Streaming on Netflix
Emily Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada
Emily Blunt’s assignment was simple. Share the screen with red-hot up-and-comer Anne Hathaway and acting royalty Meryl Streep, and give as good as she got. She did that and more as the snappy British personal assistant to Streep’s Anna Wintour-esque magazine editor. Working with a relatively small part, Blunt brought both a spiky humour and pathos (her character’s obsession with perfection leads her to starve herself, snaffling cheese whenever she feels a faint coming on).
She was every bit the equal of Hathaway and Streep and dominated her scenes. So much so that her presence was essential to the Devil Wears Prada sequel currently in production: without her, this Devil would be under-cooked and cool to the touch.
Streaming on Disney+ and Prime Video
Christopher Waltz in Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino’s Second World War romp was hyped at the time as a vehicle for Brad Pitt, who chews the scenery as a Nazi-scalping US lieutenant. But today, Pitt’s performance has all but faded into insignificance. Instead, everyone remembers the then-unknown Waltz’s SS officer Hans Landa, absolutely chilling even while he plays up the hokey war movie caricature of the gentleman Nazi – refined, laconic and heartless.
Tarantino’s take on the Second World War has a mad, gonzo quality, and Waltz honours that tone with a performance that pulsates with pantomime villain energy yet is also cold, calculating and terrifying.
Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV and Sky Store
LaKeith Stanfield in Get Out
By all accounts, character actor Stanfield was deeply spooked by director Jordan Peele’s concept of body-snatched African-Americans whose minds are stolen by wealthy white people. He embodied that terror when his character, Andre, warns off Daniel Kaluuya with the line that gave the film its title: “Get out… get out!”
That exchange occurs after a camera flash breaks the spell that the white oppressors (and possessors) have cast on him. Later, with the possession re-established, Andre’s cheerily blank delivery is hugely unsettling. There’s no lack of jump scares in Get Out once the film picks up pace. But it is Stanfield’s performance of a person who has had their mind wiped and their soul bleached that truly leaves a chill.
Streaming on Netflix and Now
Rosamund Pike in Saltburn
In a movie brimming with beautiful young things, Pike’s dim, privileged Gen X-er steals the show. Lady Elspeth is as rich and thick as artisanal ice-cream and Pike milks those clichés for every last drop of comedy opposite Jacob Elordi as her empty-headed son and Barry Keoghan as his oddball Oxford friend plotting their downfall.
Nowhere is that better demonstrated than in the instantly quotable scene where she pooh-poohs the idea that, back in the 90s, she inspired Pulp’s “Common People”. “She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge,” says Pike with perfect timing. “It couldn’t have been about me. I’ve never wanted to know anything.”
Streaming on Prime Video
