If You Ain’t First, You’re Last: Will Ferrell’s Ten Best Performances

Will Ferrell has a new Amazon Prime movie out this weekend, as You Are Cordially Invited teams him up with Reese Witherspoon for slapstick and pranks as two families (one led by Ferrell’s overcautious father of the bride, the other by Witherspoon’s presumably usual Type A) must occupy the same wedding venue for a weekend because of a booking snafu. Ferrell has made plenty of high-concept comedies like this in his day, but what separates him from so many of his peers is his dedication to his craft; even in a junky movie, he maintains a puppyish enthusiasm for making people laugh, and in a good one, he can be absolutely hilarious serving the material rather than his ego. It brings to mind Tina Fey’s comment about Ferrell on Saturday Night Live: That no one was better at being on that show than Ferrell, presumably meaning that without getting into discussions of the most absolutely talented SNL players, Ferrell took to that format with greater ease than anyone else on his level. This should have made him a potentially flailing movie star, or at least more of a clutch player than a leading man. Yet some of his broad comedies, particularly his work with former collaborator Adam McKay, are among the 21st century’s finest. He’s got a few less-heralded gems, too, so let’s count down his ten best performances so far – ranked by his work in the films, not the films’ overall quality, though they’re all, at minimum, recommendable. Many of them are outright classics of the genre. In other words, he’s kind of a big deal.
The Ten Best Will Ferrell Performances
10. Melinda and Melinda (2005)
Being asked to play the Woody Allen part in a movie where Woody Allen does not appear was once a dependable, thankless job. Now that it’s no longer dependable, it seems even more thankless in retrospect; either you’re accidentally trying to make a Woody Allen movie more palatable to those who might prefer to skip them, or you’re serving as a weird ghost of his mannerisms and style of humor even when he’s not on screen. If you can set that baggage aside, however, as Ferrell does one of the best spins on the Allen persona in Melinda and Melinda, a meditation on whether life is a farce or a tragedy. Much of the movie is an interesting if slightly wan execution of a great idea: Intercutting the same story told twice, once as comedy and once as drama. The comedy side works out a lot better, thanks in part to Ferrell in the Woody-ish role of Hobie, a failed actor who develops an interest in Melinda (Radha Mitchell in both versions). Most actors tasked with “doing” Allen feel like bad impressionists; Ferrell seemingly can’t help but give the one-liners his own bizarre spin. It comes out as part weird tribute, part winking parody, and part Ferrell goofiness.
9. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013)
Ferrell and Adam McKay’s sequel to Anchorman is undeniably inferior to the original: More overstuffed, less fresh, and self-conscious of the original’s quotable lines in that sequel-y way. It’s also very funny despite itself – and in particular, Ferrell does an absolutely priceless send-up of Oscar-baiting anguish in the section of the movie where Burgundy goes blind, takes up residence in a lighthouse, and cares for a baby shark named Dobie. These moments, plus the genuinely fraught and sometimes disturbing scenes of Burgundy attempting to parent his young son, deepen the character’s cartoon version of toxic masculinity, even as embracing the most outsized gestures. It’s vintage Ferrell, even if the movie is the least of his collaborations with McKay.
8. Everything Must Go (2010)
The go-to choice for “underrated, underseen movie with a serious, understated Will Ferrell performance” is Stranger Than Fiction, a dramedy where Ferrell plays a man cursed with the ability to hear an unseen narrator accompanying his every action, revealing him as a character in someone else’s novel. The only problem is the movie itself, which is smug, quasi-literary Charlie Kaufman Lite that has no real reason to exist alongside the likes of Adaptation or Synecdoche, New York. Besides, if you wanna really go lit-head, why not choose Ferrell doing Raymond Carver? Everything Must Go adapts a short story from a master of the form into a modest indie drama about an alcoholic who loses his job and wife in short order, and as a stop-gap solution holds a yard sale of all his belongings. It’s not a great movie – some of its story developments are outright cop-outs – but it doesn’t hide behind conceptual cutesiness and trusts Ferrell to really sell the material out there on his own, outside the comforts of shtick. Intentionally or not, Everything Must Go also provides a dramatic mirror to many of Ferrell’s silliest roles, where he obviously gets a kick out of imagining how his characters might hit rock bottom.
7. Compendium of Walk-Ons: Austin Powers, Starsky & Hutch, Wedding Crashers, The Goods, and more
Ferrell and his occasional co-star Ben Stiller have done a major service in the art of comedy stardom, dispelling the idea that being a star means exerting tight control over your every project, for which you serve as the sun, moon, and stars. Perhaps both of them having some experience toiling away in supporting roles, getting whatever laughs they could in movies of varying quality, prepared them for the idea that once they hit it big, they could still pop up in other people’s movies, doing whatever ridiculous bit was called for. For Ferrell in particular, it’s a way for him to stay connected to his roots as one of the best to ever do it on Saturday Night Live, which often calls upon even the brightest talent in their roster to play the straight man, the dad, the extra guy, or the two-line weirdo. Few SNL players get as big as Ferrell, and yet few also seem so delighted to keep doing the grunt work for fun.
6. Zoolander (2001)
Ferrell has played a bad-guy-gone-good in two animated movies, Megamind and The Lego Movie, and a buffoonish antagonist in Barbie. But his one substantial villain role came early in his career with Mugatu, the outlandishly coiffed fashion mogul who plots to have Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) turn into a mindless assassin (though Derek has the “mindless” part pretty well covered on his own). Ferrell’s shouted exhortations are like full-sentence exclamation points, and they’ve only been put to better use in select SNL sketches. The shrill urgency of Mugatu’s proclamations make him a perfect fashion-world baddie, driven by an unquenchable desire to stay on top of the new hotness but also revel in past glories (“I invented the piano-key necktie!”).
5. Elf (2003)
Ferrell had his first really big movie hit with Old School, sort of a middle-aged Animal House. He’s funny in it, of course, but he’s basically doing a feature-length version of many of his SNL characters: the repressed suburban dork who unleashes a torrent of emotion, whether anger, aggression, panic, or lust for life. It was later that same year that Ferrell made a more surprising pivot, in the genre where comedians typically go to wither: family film, with the now-classic Elf. As Buddy, a human adopted into Santa’s workshop, Ferrell radiates childlike glee that keeps edging toward something demented before pulling back into mere enthusiasm. His zeal somehow cuts through the treacle, even when treacle is precisely what Buddy craves. (You get the sense that he’s more elf than many natural-born elves.) Obviously Ferrell isn’t the only one who makes the movie work, yet it’s hard to imagine this sticking around for 20 more Christmases’ worth of rewatches without him.
4. Step Brothers (2008)
Speaking of childlike wonder: Ferrell and John C. Reilly expertly curdle both their capacity for sweetness and the charming-manchild-coming-of-age comedy in this gonzo Adam McKay buddy comedy. Rather than the usual 2000s-era spectacle of a twenty-to-thirtysomething acting more like a 17-year-old goofing off, Ferrell and Reilly are 40-year-olds whose cushy failure to launch has arrested their development somewhere around 11 years old. It’s like a body-swap movie where the adult minds are sent into some inescapable abyss (and the “real” adults go mad with frustration at the miscreants rediscovering their youthful zest). It might be the funniest movie on this list (or at least competitive for the title), and only doesn’t climb higher because Ferrell and Reilly’s characters are only half-distinguished from one another. Part of the joke is that they’re like one adolescent brain spread across two gangly, awkward adult bodies.
3. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
Talladega Nights remains the highest-grossing Ferrell-McKay joint, and at first glance that’s because it combines Ferrell’s go-to sports formula (he’s also done movies about soccer, basketball, ice skating) with NASCAR, which has been relatively underrepresented in movies, and a riff on his George W. Bush impression as a wildly overconfident and underintelligent bozo. Those factors likely contributed to its success, but part of what makes it stand out years later – apart from the fact that Ferrell and McKay are ace cultural satirists – is Ferrell’s well-modulated performance as Ricky Bobby, the cocksure, fuck-yeah-America racecar driver humbled by his fall from grace (at the hands of a Frenchman, no less!). His Bush impression was accused of making the president insidiously likable, doing accidental PR work for the less-charismatic real thing, and maybe he’s doing the same thing here for a boob who feels like a prototypical Trump voter. But as a fictional character, Ricky Bobby is free to redeem himself, and as the movie pokes at Ricky’s genuine hurt over repeated abandonment by his father (Gary Cole), Ferrell reveals a wounded-child sensitivity that never gets too cloying (and shows far more humanity than most of Ricky Bobby’s proudly cruel contemporary equivalents).
2. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)
Sure, everyone remembers Ron Burgundy’s various memorable lines (“I love scotch, scotchy-scotch-scotch”; “I’m kind of a big deal”; “I’m in a glass case of emotion!”). But there’s a deceptively difficult balance Will Ferrell needs to strike in playing this ’70s-era chauvinist thrown for a loop by a lady in his San Diego newsroom: He needs to be a big, broad caricature of thickheaded masculinity, and he also needs to be somewhat less ridiculous than the remainder of his news team (brilliantly played by Paul Rudd, David Koechner, and Steve Carell) in order to court (however briefly) the talented Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate). It’s not just a question of making Ron sympathetic so much as a comic figure who believably participates in a multi-channel news team gang battle, and then turn around to lead a scene where he both analyzes and undersells the carnage they’ve all just witnessed (“Yeah, Brick killed a guy!”). It’s especially difficult to do this without making a comedy that appears to be selling out its characters and talking out of both sides of its mouth. That’s Ferrell’s genius in Anchorman and throughout his career: He can play pompous, unearned confidence; undermining insecurities; and brief moments of clarity, and make them all fit together in a way that’s comedy-world elastic yet not relentlessly phony. Anchorman was the first time on a big screen that Ferrell felt fully unleashed, in performance style and in full, deranged vulnerability. It may go down as the single greatest boy-man comedy, because the boy-man in question has such a recognizably absurd position of authority.
1. The Other Guys (2010)
So if Anchorman can lay claim to being one of Ferrell’s funniest movies, even to being one of the funniest movies ever, why is The Other Guys here above it? It’s Ferrell again; his performance as Allen Gamble, a bookish NYPD officer rejected for lack of exactly the bravado that fuels wannabe-alpha men like Ron Burgundy and Ricky Bobby, cleverly reversing the bombast-to-sensitivity ratio from other Ferrell/McKay comedies, leaving the bluster to a never-funnier Mark Wahlberg. That teamwork inspired the pair to reunite for two Daddy’s Home movies, but they both lack the satirical edge and clear sense of character that McKay’s movie so much more rewatchable. And even within a movie where Ferrell is intentionally more mild than wild, his performance can accommodate lunatic swings, like the sidebar where Allen reveals a past as a pimp named Gator. Finally: I haven’t yet spoken about Ferrell’s gift for improvisation, so let’s bring out a perfect, sustained example: the scene where Allen offers an even-keeled rejoinder to his partner’s macho threats, explaining how he, as a tuna, would defeat Wahlberg, a self-proclaimed lion. Given how many actors limit their ad-libs to funny one-liners at best (and half-assed shtick at worst), Ferrell’s ability here (assisted, of course, by his former collaborator McKay) is almost superhuman.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.