The movie Steve Coogan is confident everyone will hate in 20 years: “They’ll still think it’s shit”
As well as bringing Alan Partridge, one of the finest comic creations in TV history, into a fourth decade, Steve Coogan has been putting in career-best performances in recent years, fashioning a body of work that proves he can rightfully now be called this generation’s Peter Sellers.
And that would probably please him, because Sellers is Coogan’s comedy hero, his career is beginning to look very similar, and he was devastated to miss out on playing him as far back as a movie about the legendary comic in 2003, that role going to Geoffrey Rush. Coogan is now also taking on some of the roles that Sellers himself played, as with last year’s national theatre tour of Dr Strangelove, the 1964 Stanley Kubrick classic in which Sellers starred as several characters.
Coogan, again like Sellers, is also a master at moving between comedy and drama; he can seamlessly go from making an incredibly dark and powerful series like the Jimmy Saville biopic The Reckoning to the hilarity of Partridge and on to The Trip with Rob Brydon, the travelogue-mockumentary that blurs the line between fact and fiction.
His talents were also recognised by Hollywood fairly early on, although not with much success in the early days. He has no fond memories of making movies like Around the World in 80 Days with Jackie Chan, and not until 2013 did he really find big-screen success thanks to his writing and starring in Philomena, which earned him two Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’.
After that, he began to seem much more comfortable traversing the Atlantic in order to make films, and he was fantastic in 2018’s Laurel and Hardy retrospective, Stan & Ollie, alongside John C Reilly. But an example of how fickle the industry can be came the very same year, and in a film co-starring the very same actor in Reilly. This time, however, it was not fantastic. Not in any way at all.
Because the next movie he made went down as one of the worst comedies, or even films, of recent times. Holmes & Watson was an absolute mess of a movie, an unfunny waste of millions of dollars that hoped to recapture Reilly and Will Ferrell’s magic on Step Brothers a decade earlier but only succeeded in almost completely derailing both of the actors’ careers.
Coogan, who had a mercifully uncredited role in the film, probably summed it up when he said, “In 20 years’ time, when all the dust has settled, and people are able to look at that film objectively, they’ll still think it’s shit.”
And he wasn’t alone. The Baker St detective parody picked up six Golden Raspberry Award nominations, and the test screenings went so badly that Sony tried to flog the film on the cheap to Netflix before it was even released. Coogan, who appeared with Reilly at an awards show the following year, even suggested it as a cure for an upset stomach, saying, “(It’s) best to avoid laughing. If you want to do that, I can recommend a film that John and I did called Holmes & Watson. You should be pretty safe with that.”
Coogan’s star looks like it’s going to continue to rise on both sides of the pond over the next year or so however, because there’s another season of The Trip on the way, and he has also joined the cast of HBO’s smash The White Lotus for season four, where he’ll be starring alongside Ben Kingsley and Jurassic Park’s Laura Dern (but not Helena Bonham Carter).
