Jason Bateman names the greatest comedy actor of all time: “He never asks for a laugh”
Nobody should have been all that surprised when Jason Bateman broke out of his wheelhouse to reveal that he’s as potent a dramatic actor as he is a comedic one, mostly because he’s been around long enough to be constantly adding new strings to his performative bow.
Since making his screen debut in 1981 as Little House on the Prairie‘s James Cooper Ingalls, and then immediately following it up with his turn as Silver Spoons‘ Derek Taylor, he’s barely been out of the spotlight. Unfortunately, he went through many of the struggles that affect child stars.
Bateman battled alcohol and drug addiction throughout the 1990s, rendering him somewhere between a forgotten man and an afterthought, but since getting sober in 2001, he’s been everywhere. Arrested Development lit the touchpaper on the second act of his career, and since then, he hasn’t looked back.
Dodgeball, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Tropic Thunder, Couples Retreat, The Switch, The Change Up, Identity Thief, and more established him as one of the most ubiquitous scene-stealers in the comedy genre, before his latest act began when his performance in Ozark saw him become the latest star intrinsically linked with comedy to get their flowers for going serious.
He’d written, directed, and produced before the Netflix series debuted, but playing the lead role, helming several episodes, and serving as an executive producer on the backwater thriller anointed him as a serious triple threat. They say comedy is harder than drama, and Bateman has made both look equally effortless.
Speaking of which, the star believes that the best kind of onscreen comics are the ones who don’t mug for the cameras. Making an audience laugh without actively trying to make them laugh is much harder than it sounds, which, like many of his peers and contemporaries, he remains enthralled by Peter Sellers.
Obviously, the characters he played in the Pink Panther series and Dr Strangelove were hardly subtle, and they were supposed to tickle funny bones, but during a deep dive in the Criterion Closet, Bateman pointed to Hal Ashby’s Being There as epitomising everything that made its leading man one of the greats.
“Peter Sellers, one of the original kind of no-winking comedy guys,” he explained. “There’s a lot of pure acting chops in what he does. He never asks for a laugh. You’ve got to pay attention. No jokes. It’s just characters that would be deeply offended if they heard anybody laughing at what they were going through and what they were doing or saying.”
Bateman was adamant that it “takes a lot of good acting to do this kind of comedy,” and he’s right. Sellers’ multi-faceted turns may have inspired hams like Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy, and Mike Myers, but he was still good enough as a dramatist to earn two Academy Award nominations for a genre that the Oscars haven’t always been receptive to.
