9. Patton Oswalt - Big Fan (2009)
Patton Oswalt began his career as one of those guys whose faces you recognised, but whose names you could never quite put your finger on. Slowly, he began to graduate onto the role of the comedy sidekick, and probably his biggest coup was getting a starring role on popular TV show
King of Queens, before voicing Remy in Pixar's hugely successful animated film
Ratatouille. Oswalt really impressed us, though, in 2009, when he took up the mantle in
Big Fan, a film about an obsessive fan of the New York Giants, who has to deal with the fallout once his favourite player ends up drunkenly assaulting him in a bar. Now, a premise like this sounds ripe for a comedy, and while Big Fan certainly has its hilarious moments, this is a mostly serious, surprisingly dark film about the lonely, insular life of a sporting fanatic. Oswalt is superbly cast as Paul Aufiero, the overweight, overly-dedicated football fan who still lives at home and seems to have little of a life outside of his devotion to the New York Giants. Reminiscent more of films like
The King of Comedy than of wacky, balls-out comedies, writer-director Robert D. Siegel (
The Wrestler) satirises the world of sports fandom in a deeply disturbing way, which nevertheless ends on a hilarious punchline, with credit due largely to Oswalt's hugely convincing performance. With an excellent dramatic turn recently opposite Charlize Theron in Jason Reitman's
Young Adult, one can only hope that he continues along this trajectory.