Andy Samberg

Watch Andy Samberg in the pilot of Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013). Captain Holt asks why he is not wearing a tie and then waits, and Samberg's Jake Peralta fills the silence. That is his habit. He talks, gets most of it wrong on the way, and turns out to have the right answer underneath. Andre Braugher does nothing with his face, and the laugh belongs to the man standing still. Samberg has always known this. He needs a wall, and he is good at finding one.

He came up on Saturday Night Live, from 2005 to 2012, making digital shorts and parody songs with Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer as The Lonely Island. Hot Rod (2007), with Samberg as Rod Kimble, was the group's first film. That work was juvenile on purpose, and some found it merely juvenile, which was not always unfair. Then came Peralta, 152 episodes and eight seasons from 17 September 2013 to 2021, with Melissa Fumero beside him for the whole run, and a steady sideline in family animation, usually as the enthusiastic supporting creature, in the Hotel Transylvania and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs films. Palm Springs (2020), as Nyles, is where others first noticed something quieter in him. We have not reviewed it. Lee (2024) is where we did.

The sitcom is the bulk of the work and we recommend it, with a caveat that is about him. Samberg plays Jake as a man-child who is forgiven at the end of every episode, and somewhere around the fourth season we grew tired of watching him be forgiven. The timing never slips; the ensemble is quick and warm; but the part does not move, and by the later runs the show is thinner and he is the same. When the joking is only a job, as with Pawbert Lynxley in Zootopia 2 (2025), he is given a great deal to say and not much to be, and he says it well enough and leaves no mark.

Then there is Lee. His David E. Scherman is watchful and dry, tells no jokes, and simply keeps Kate Winslet's Miller company, and the two of them arguing in a ruined hotel room about whether to go on is the best written stretch of the film. In the camps the music stops and the talking nearly stops, and he and Winslet walk through what they find with their cameras up. We sat very still through it, because he had finally stopped filling the silence, and what was left was a man looking. It is the best thing he has done, and it is the least.

He has spent twenty years talking, and the two performances of his we will keep are the one where he waits for Braugher and the one where he says nothing at all. More of that, and fewer Lynxleys.