“My all-time favourite”: Matthew Lillard names the best movie of his career
In the case of a character actor like Matthew Lillard, any opportunity to be a leading man is a valuable experience.
One of the most unusual, albeit heartwarming, incidents in recent film discourse has been the unanimous support that Matthew Lillard has received after being criticised by Quentin Tarantino in a podcast appearance. While Tarantino frequently calls out actors that he’s not a fan of, the nastiness of his remarks about Lillard ironically inspired many people to think about why they like him so much.
Lillard is an actor who is easy to take for granted because he’s been a consistent presence in cinema for well over three decades. Although he first broke out in John Waters’ dark comedy Serial Mom, it was his performance as Stu in the original Scream that turned him into a modern ‘scream king’, his performance seemingly encapsulating multiple different horror tropes into one character: Stu was the villain, the comic relief, the bumbling sidekick, and the unsuspected mastermind all at once.
The actor has certainly not slowed down, working steadily ever since, however, most of his best roles are those where he only appears in a short capacity. While he only appeared briefly in films like The Descendants and The Life of Chuck, his performances were so singular that they became defining aspects of the respective ensemble casts, and similarly, his unique yet haunting performance in Twin Peaks: The Return showed he was one of the few actors who could get on David Lynch’s unique wavelength.
While Lillard has always been humble about the roles that have been offered to him, especially since he has become the de facto voice of Shaggy in nearly every Scooby-Doo project after playing the character in the two live-action films, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he cited one of his few lead performances as his personal favorite project that he has ever appeared in.
“My all-time favourite is SLC Punk!,” he said, “That was my opportunity to be in every frame of the movie and not have to do everything in four minutes of screen time”.
Lillard is the type of actor who can play unusual, undefinable characters that feel completely singular, and SLC Punk! offered him the opportunity to do that while also capturing the emotional arc of a protagonist.
Centring on the lives of two punks living in Salt Lake City in the ‘80s, it wasn’t just one of the defining punk films within the revival era of the late 1990s, but one of the most evident examples of how independent cinema could go mainstream, playing at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999 before entering wide release three months later. Considering its low budget, it was an outsized success that only expanded its fanbase once it became more readily available on home video, which was instrumental for many films that proved to be cult classics.
It’s a film that satirises some of the more self-aggrandising aspects of punk culture, while also carrying a powerful message about self-actualisation, including some great chemistry between Lillard and his co-star, Michael A Goorjian, and given that there haven’t been many great punk films since SLC Punk!, and even fewer that are as insightful and funny, it’s safe to say that it is a subgenre that Lillard has a monopoly on.
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