Jurassic Park! Steve Coogan movie roles – ranked | film

Steve Coogan entered the unofficial British Comedy Hall of Fame at the age of 30, when he joined four Pythons and the likes of Stephen Fry and Victoria Wood in this largely forgotten version of the classic children’s story. Wearing a long scarf and wearing frameless specs, he takes on a respectably troubled role as the Mole alongside Eric Idle’s Mouse and Terry Jones’ Toad.

In the comedy about museum exhibits that come to life at night, Coogan plays Octavius, a miniature Roman general. Although it’s a small part, literally, Coogan makes the most of sharing the screen with Robin Williams, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson – “We may be small, but our hearts are big… figuratively speaking!” He shouts at a Steeler security guard.

This quirky high school comedy sold for $10 million at Sundance, and was expected to be the vehicle that would break America for Coogan. Instead, the film flopped badly and went straight to DVD in the UK. It’s not hard to see why: It’s a strange and misguided story of a drama teacher with parental issues who directs an ill-advised sequel to Hamlet. Coogan throws it all in and gets a few laughs — the highlight being “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” in which he jumps around in a jacket — but he can’t quite put it all together.

Released the same month as Hamlet 2, Ben Stiller’s ambitious but exhausting satire placed Coogan alongside some real Hollywood A-listers: Stiller himself, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, and even Tom Cruise. As Damian Cockburn, the struggling British director of a big-budget Vietnam War film, Coogan seems out of place in this bombastic and largely unfunny film, where his character exits explosively early.

Based on the memoir by Tom Michell (who last week denied historical sexual assault allegations), this bizarre drama sees Coogan embrace his late middle age as a depressed schoolteacher who rescues a penguin during the dark days of Argentina’s military dictatorship. His sombre, dignified performance saves this starkly sentimental film, written by frequent collaborator Jeff Pope, from being too stuffy.

Coogan once said in an interview with The Guardian that just thinking about this ridiculous Ealing style makes him “squirm”. It certainly wasn’t an appropriate medium for a TV comedian at the height of his powers, but it was still an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes. Coogan’s ill-conceived character is a big part of the problem: he’s a mild-mannered liberal probation officer who somehow orchestrates a bank robbery to uncover bent copper.

Securing coveted “and” billing in the credits, Coogan plays the Austrian ambassador to the French court in Sofia Coppola’s divisive drama. He doesn’t have much to do except advise the young queen (Kirsten Dunst) to hurry up and get pregnant, but he shows that he can handle a completely straight role — his first in a movie — without mocking the dialogue or indulging in Partridge antics.

In a glittering cameo, Coogan wears tinted glasses and earrings as Pete Easterman, a swashbuckling TV actor who has had occasional success as The Windjammer, while star Richard Thorncroft’s (Julian Barratt) career has reached a slide. Receiving Thorncroft at his country club on the Isle of Man, Easterman rejected his suggestion of a DVD release, reminding him, “You called me a stinking ham in Wogan, with the emotional range of a chair leg.”

Along with fellow Northern stars Ricky Tomlinson and Lisa Stansfield and his old comedy partner John Thompson, Coogan lends his star power to this brilliant evocation of Lancashire’s Northern Soul dance movement of the 1970s. He plays a teacher who delights in writing off his students as “hammerheads” and humiliates a boy by reading out words he’s scribbled in a notebook (“Bloody hell, it’s a poem… it’s reels, that is”).

Beginning a remarkable series of films in 2012 and 2013, Coogan played a small role in this clever fantasy about a writer (Paul Dano) who somehow brings a young woman (Zoe Kazan) into existence through a typewriter. Joining an alpha supporting cast that includes Elliot Gould, Annette Bening and Antonio Banderas, Coogan impresses with his devilish turn as sleazy satirist Langdon Tharp.

10. Greed (2019)

Coogan plays the vulgar retail tycoon and bully Sir Richard Macready – all permanently tanned and distractingly expensive – in this heavy-handed but often funny satire. If only director Michael Winterbottom had expanded Coogan further and delved deeper into Macready’s strange relationships with his mother (Shirley Henderson) and ex-wife (Isla Fisher) instead of making predictable points about the injustices of capitalism and the plight of garment workers and refugees.

In Armando Iannucci’s political satire, Coogan plays an angry voter who complains to hapless minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) about the collapse of the wall. The whiff of danger is essential to the character – at one point he shouts: “I won’t let a bomb explode, I work for the National Trust!” – But it takes on a disturbing appearance today after the killing of Representatives Jo Cox and David Ames.

Coogan presents a nuanced, if strangely pessimistic, portrait of Paul Raymond, the Soho strip club and porn mogul who was once Britain’s richest man, in this entertaining but shallow film from Winterbottom, which doesn’t quite understand Raymond’s multi-faceted character: a highly motivated and unconventional businessman, with a voracious appetite for sex, drink and drugs, who doted on his daughter (Imogen Poots) and Devastated by her death.