Rose Byrne names the greatest comedy actor of all time: “Look at him, he’s so funny”
Actors who make their name in comedy venturing into more serious fare and delivering an acclaimed, knockout, and career-best performance has become one of Hollywood’s most trusted rites of passage, but Rose Byrne has already succeeded where many others of a similar ilk have failed.
Her phenomenal, remarkable, and astonishing turn as Linda in writer and director Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the second-best movie of 2025, according to some incredibly knowledgeable sources, deservedly earned Byrne an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’.
Jim Carrey doesn’t have an Oscar nod, and neither do Adam Sandler or Will Ferrell. Byrne is now on level footing with the likes of Eddie Murphy, Jonah Hill, Steve Carell, Melissa McCarthy, and Michael Keaton as stars who rose to fame in the comedy genre before earning the Academy’s attention, although Hamnet‘s Jessie Buckley makes it unlikely that she’ll join Robin Williams by taking to the podium.
That said, Byrne isn’t a comedian by trade; it was just something she fell into and showed herself to be very, very good at. Some of her earliest Hollywood credits came in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, which weren’t what you’d call laugh-a-minute romps.
However, as was the case for most of the cast, Bridesmaids changed everything. It wasn’t her first major role in a mainstream comedy, but it’s best to forget about the increasingly cursed cast of Get Him to the Greek, and before long, she became a staple of the genre, starring alongside Seth Rogen, Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Tiffany Haddish, McCarthy, Ferrell, and other established comic performers.
Obviously, if an actor makes a lot of comedies, and those comedies account for most of their biggest, most successful, and well-known hits, then they’ll always run the risk of being typecast. On the other side of that coin, few things kick down doors that had previously been locked shut than an Oscar nomination, so the grass will almost certainly be greener when Byrne steps through the other side.
With that in mind, since she didn’t grow up dreaming of being a comedy staple, it makes sense that her pick for the greatest comedy actor of all time was of a similar mind. Well, that’s stretching the comparison almost beyond the bounds of credulity, since she awarded that distinction to Robert De Niro, of all people.
“That’s obviously not something maybe necessarily people would say at the top of their head,” she informed USA Today, and with good reason. “But look at him, he’s so funny in his intensity.” De Niro can by funny, as Midnight Run, Analyze This, and Meet the Parents, to name but three, can attest, but he’s also made a lot of comedy flicks that are nothing short of awful.
The mere mention of the phrase, ‘Robert De Niro comedy’, is enough to send a shiver down the spine of many cinephiles, and it’s been a long time since he was outright hilarious onscreen, but as far as Byrne is concerned, he’s the single greatest comedy actor of all time.
