Liev Schreiber: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

5 Awesome Performances...

5. Cotton Weary - Scream 1-3

Say what you will about the quality of the Scream movies and the acting performances contained within them, but Liev Schreiber's turn as wrongly accused murderer Cotton Weary throughout the first three chapters of Wes Craven's horror movie deconstruction franchise still arguably marks his most famous and well-known performance. It's not so much that Liev's acting here is totally awesome (though it's appropriately executed and he marks his territory well), in so much that his character has become a fairly iconic and integral part of Scream lore. We barely glimpse Cotton Weary in the first Scream movie, of course, as he's thrown in jail and accused of being a murderer at the very beginning. It's not until Scream 2, then, that Cotton really gets a chance to shine and is utilised again as a human red herring. Riding on the coattails of fame that the incidents depicted in the first two Scream movies afforded him, Cotton is appropriately hilarious in Scream 3 as a TV host. The great thing about Liev's portrayal of this character stems from our inability to trust him. Liev plays him brilliantly as "normal-ish."