Ayo Edebiri names her four favourite movies of all time
The wonderful thing about the film and television industry is that it keeps on moving and churning out the next future stars. Over the last few years, one young actor and writer who has been making serious strides for themselves in the entertainment world is Ayo Edibiri, a surefire icon of tomorrow.
Even to this point, Edebiri has featured in some excellent roles and contributed her talents as a writer to many more. She’s voiced Missy on Big Mouth (and written for its fourth season), starred in the television shows The Bear and Abbott Elementary and has also offered her acting talents to the movies Theater Camp, Bottoms, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.
There’s no doubt, then, that Edebiri is a rising star and will continue to enjoy her initial success in the entertainment industry. She once named her four favourite movies of all time with Letterboxd, which gives a clue as to her personal inspiration and clues as to which direction her professional life may go.
The first is Sergio Leone’s 1966 epic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is also Quentin Tarantino’s favourite movie of all time. The third and final part of Leone’s Dollars Trilogy sees Clint Eastwood once again portray ‘The Man With No Name’, and it’s widely considered one of the most significant efforts in the western genre.
Changing mood completely, Edibiri then goes for Roger Michell’s 1999 romantic comedy Notting Hill, starring Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts Rhys Ifans and Emma Chambers, telling of an English bookseller who falls for an American actor, who wanders into his Notting Hill bookshop one fateful day.
Edebiri’s following selection is one that has a similarity to Notting Hill, at least in their promotional posters. It’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 film Phantom Thread, in which Daniel Day-Lewis plays Reynolds Woodcock, a haute couture dressmaker, who begins a somewhat complicated relationship with a waiter (played by Vicky Kriepps) when she becomes his muse.
Rounding off her four favourite films, Edibiri said, “[This] literally, top to bottom, structurally, is a perfect film, starring perfect performances by 60 pigs.” The film is, of course, 1995’s Babe, directed by Chris Noonan, an adaptation of Dick King-Smith’s The Sheep-Pig, which tells of a farm pig that believes he can perform the role of a sheepdog.
Ayo Edebiri’s four favourite movies:
- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)
- Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999)
- Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)
- Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995)
