Decade Awards con't - Most Memorable "Mini-role"

This is a particularly fun category, because sometimes the richest and most interesting performances in a film are those with such little screen time. You know what I'm talking about... those little roles that pop in for one or two scenes but can still leave you completely stunned.

Most Memorable Mini-roles

5. Christopher McDonald in Requiem for a Dream (2000)


via videosift.com

Possibly the best role of Christopher McDonald's unheralded career is his brief turn as Tabby Tibbons, an infomercial personality in Requiem for a Dream. Except for a terrifying halucination, Tabby never appears as anything but a character in Sara Goldfarb's television and yet his presence in the film is unmistakable, funny, and always captivating.

4. William Sadler in Kinsey (2004)

William Sadler's truly unsettling performance in Kinsey is such a mini-role that I couldn't find any video of it or even his image in the film, but this is a great one-scene performance from a character actor who has excelled in supporting roles. In the film, Sadler plays Kenneth Braun, a mousy, sickeningly self-satisfied sexual deviant who claims to have had sex with hundreds of adolescent boys and girls. He attempts to share his "research" with Professor Kinsey, but he does it with such unrepentant glee that one of the Kinsey's assistant refuses to participate in the interview. Sadler imbues the character with both a clinical coldness and a sociopathic lack of guilt and self-consciousness that is remarkably effective.

3. William Baldwin in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)



William Baldwin may have reached the peak of his career in the mid 1990's when he was the go-to actor for sexually charged thrillers like Sliver and Fair Game (OK, so this isn't exactly a sexually charged thriller, but he bangs Cindy Crawford in it). Recently, however, Baldwin seems to have recognized his talent for comedy, both as Ivan the tennis instructor with a penchant for calling everyone "brother" in The Squid and the Whale and as the actor who plays Detective Hunter Rush in the fictional tv series Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The audience only gets a few glimses of this show in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but each moment William Baldwin graces the screen as Detective Rush is comedy magic. I really wish the filmmakers had actually shot an episode of Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime for the dvd special features.

2. Bill Murray in Zombieland (2009)



One of the most rewarding sequences in Zombieland is when the main characters visit the seemingly abandoned mansion of Bill Murray. While searching through the actor's palatial home, they encounter what looks like zombie Bill Murray, but is really just Bill Murray acting like a zombie to fool the other zombies. For some reason, Bill Murray acting like Bill Murray post-Zombie apocalypse is spectacularly funny, and Murray himself gives one of the most entertaining supporting performances of his career.

1. Ralph Fiennes in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

Casting the luminous Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort was one of the best decisions the Harry Potter filmmakers ever made. If someone else had assumed this role, someone less capable of conveying the character's preternatural malice and dark command, then the fourth film would have failed. It is this climactic scene where Harry Potter confronts Voldemort in human form for the first time that makes the film so compelling. Ralph Fiennes has less than ten minutes of screen time, but his full-forced immersion into the role of Lord Voldemort was worthy of an Academy Award nomination. Every aspect of his performance, his rangy, idiosyncratic movement, the dominant inflections of his eyes, is beautifully and frighteningly pronounced.