While we will always remember laughing at his antics on The Office and The Daily Show, he is now regularly doing seriously emotional work in films like Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy, and it all started with Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher.
In addition to being an amazing physically transformative performance, with Carell being practically being unrecognizable as wrestling fanatic/murderer John du Pont, it’s also a turn that very much gets under your skin, and the actor very much earned his first Best Actor nomination.
Steve Carell has had a fascinating career from a genre perspective, as he’s one of the few great comedic performers who was so successful in making the transition from comedy to drama that he basically just decided to stick with it and totally change his public profile.