“Oh, I can’t be bothered”: the iconic movie series Ricky Gervais utterly loathes
Ricky Gervais – just those two words alone will have stirred something in you.
The British comedian is easily one of the most divisive entertainers of recent times, where some people think he’s a genius, others think he’s scum, and very few land somewhere in between. Still, he continues to work at the very highest level, as both a stand-up and an actor, and while I say ‘actor’, in truth, he can only really play a version of himself.
Given his fame on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s surprising how few major film franchises Ricky Gervais has appeared in. Aside from notable roles in The Muppets (Muppets Most Wanted) and Night at the Museum trilogy, he has largely kept his distance from big studio series. This might seem odd, since he isn’t primarily known for his acting, but you might expect that Marvel or another major franchise would have offered him at least a cameo.
There might be a very good reason for this, though. On a 2003 episode of his and Stephen Merchant’s XFM radio show, the same show that gave the world Karl Pilkington, the star of The Office brought up the premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Despite it being one of the biggest events of the movie calendar that year, Gervais couldn’t have cared less.
“Oh, I can’t be bothered,” he said, “Gollum and Dungeons and Dragons and Gatekeepers and weird magic and Harry Potter…I want to punch his face in”.
Merchant provided a bit more context. “When I was at school, if you’re into that sort of thing, you are [a] nerdlinger,” he explained, “They would beat you up, they’d shout…heckle abuse, that sort of thing. I wasn’t a fan,” to which Gervais then added, “I actually don’t know anyone who admitted they were into that nonsense”.
As anyone who grew up in the 1980s or 1990s will know, the pair are absolutely right. Anything that was deemed ‘nerdy’ was social suicide, with comic books, science fiction, and fantasy all entirely off the table if you wanted to get anywhere in life, and it’s only relatively recently that ‘geek’ culture has become acceptable in the mainstream.
You only have to look at something like The Big Bang Theory: when that started in 2007, nerds were still a novelty, something to be laughed at, but by the time it wrapped up in 2019, people who liked superhero movies and Star Wars were painfully normal.
The success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films played a huge role in the normalisation of geek culture, with Return of the King the most successful of the lot. Not only has it grossed a total of over $1billion at the box office, but it also swept the Oscars in 2004, winning in all 11 categories in which it was nominated. Even Gervais himself wasn’t immune to its cultural pull. Sir Ian McKellen appeared in the second season of Extras, sending up his appearance as Gandalf in hilarious fashion, so it turns out he could be bothered when it made him some money.
