Whether for better or worse, nothing makes you sit up quite like a scenery chewing, over-the-top performance. It's something you will always remember and actors such as Sean Penn, Al Pacino, Nicolas Cage and Jack Nicholson have made careers out of dialing it up and overwhelming the screen. It's certainly one way to make an impression, although, more often than not, an over-the-top performance will be hideously grating and remind you of that horrible B-movie you accidentally stumbled across on late night TV once. You will often find ludicrously over-the-top performances in comedy, and sometimes it works, like in the case of Charlie Day and Jeremy Piven, but often it wears thin very quickly like the films of Jim Carrey and Will Ferrell. No matter how good or bad the performance is, a true over-the-top performance will have you talking, and if cinema has taught us anything, nothing gets people excited quite like an eccentric maniac who shouts a lot. I decided to have a single rule for this list: one performance per actor as the list could be entirely Nicolas Cage based otherwise.
10. Matthew McConaughey - Magic Mike
Steven Soderbergh's stripper movie, Magic Mike, was one of the best and most underrated movies of 2012, and key to the film's success was Matthew McConaughey's Oscar worthy performance as strip club owner Dallas. McConaughey has come a long way from leaning against inanimate objects on posters for awful rom-coms and has established himself as one of the most daring actors currently working. McConaughey throws himself head first into the material, and clearly isn't afraid of anything. He lets go completely, most notably in two scenes. The first one, he is teaching Alex Pettyfer how to dance whilst dressed in nothing but a tight yellow top and the smallest pair of shorts you will ever see. He plays it admirably straight and it's the funniest scene in the film. The second is his outrageous stripping sequence, where we see more of McConaughey than we ever dreamed of. McConaughey plays Dallas with a frantic energy, and he toes the line between eccentric and sleazy perfectly. The role called for an energetic, grandstanding performance and McConaughey more than delivered.