The movie Kathy Bates is ashamed to admit she adores: “My deeply secret favourite”
Is it possible for anyone to be ashamed of their favourite movie? After all, the heart wants what it wants, and the cinephile loves what they love. Kathy Bates spent years pretending a stone-cold classic was the greatest thing she’d ever seen, all while hiding her true feelings from the world.
Maybe it’s because actors are expected to place the established classics above everything else. If a thespian with a hatful of Academy Awards was asked to name their favourite movie and responded with something like Freddy Got Fingered, it would inevitably do some damage to their credibility.
Then again, it becomes a little boring and repetitive when the biggest, brightest, and most celebrated stars rattle off Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first two chapters in The Godfather trilogy, or one of Akira Kurosawa’s many masterpieces. Where’s the spice? The variety? The off-centre candidates?
Fortunately, Bates decided to come clean. The Oscar winner has been one of the most reliable presences across stage and screen since the early 1970s, winning a pair of Primetime Emmys, two Golden Globes, and being shortlisted for a Tony thanks to almost half a century of top-drawer performances.
She’s appeared in classic films, acclaimed TV shows, and lauded theatre productions and worked with a cavalcade of legends that includes Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Dustin Hoffman, Clint Eastwood, and Nicole Kidman, most of whom have been in at least one picture that fits the criteria for being known as one of the greatest ever made.
It stands to reason that someone as accomplished as Bates would have fallen in love with a genuine all-timer as her personal favourite flick, which was the illusion she tried to maintain. “For years, I have said To Kill a Mockingbird,” she said. “My deeply secret favourite movie is Meet Joe Black.”
Martin Brest’s exhausting, overlong, painfully mediocre, and Razzie-nominated fantasy drama arguably wasn’t even one of the 20 best movies of 1998, not that Bates gives a shit. In an interview with Variety, she explained why it’s always been and always will be her ultimate guilty pleasure.
“I love that movie,” she confessed. “It has two of my favourite actors in it. Well, three. Of course, Anthony Hopkins. Brad Pitt is phenomenal in that film. And Marcia Gay Harden, who was kind enough, when I was directing years ago, to come and do a little bit for me. She’s a phenomenal actress.”
Bates went on to call the story and the music “phenomenal,” even though most modern audiences probably know Meet Joe Black best for turning the scene where Pitt’s title character gets pancaked by multiple vehicles into a meme. It’s not even a good film, never mind a great one, but theoretically speaking, every movie ever made has the potential to become somebody’s favourite.
Gregory Peck’s seminal turn as Atticus Finch in Robert Mulligan’s timeless legal drama was all a ruse, or maybe it really was Bates’ favourite from the first time she saw it up until Meet Joe Black was released, after which point there was a new sheriff in town.
