Lee Evans is a stand-up who works with the whole body, and the films use him that way: a run of hapless, sweating supporting men who cannot keep still. It suits a comedy that needs one clown, less well one that already has three.
Fi1m perspective
Lee Evans acts from the neck down. On stage his comedy was built on movement: the sweat, the face pulled out of shape, the body thrown across the boards before the line arrived. He has explained it himself. "I started doing physical comedy, because I was like a moving target." The films took him at his word and put him in the corner of the frame, where he is the one thing moving when everybody else is standing still.
The career has a plain shape. He came to film from stand-up with Funny Bones (1995), playing Jack Parker for Peter Chelsom, and Hollywood came calling. Between 1997 and 2003 he did a string of studio comedies, among them The Fifth Element (1997) as Fog, MouseHunt, and There's Something About Mary (1998) as Tucker. Then a turn: a dramatic lead in Freeze Frame (2004) as Sean Veil, for which he shaved his head and body. A Doctor Who guest part followed in 2009. He retired from stand-up in 2014.
What works is the precision. The clowning looks loose and is not; every gesture is placed, every expression held for exactly as long as it needs to be, and Funny Bones is where that is most visible. What works less well is company. In There's Something About Mary he is one of several men competing to be the most foolish over Cameron Diaz, and somewhere in the second hour we felt the crowding: Tucker is a good comic idea in a film that has run out of room for comic ideas, and Evans is squeezed through no fault of his own. In The Fifth Element he is Fog, an early Hollywood supporting part, and a small one.
There is a criticism of his stand-up that carries over. When the material had to stand on its own, without the body, it was ordinary, and the same is true on screen: give him a scene of talk and you get a pleasant, unremarkable actor, give him a door to walk into and you get Lee Evans. The Hollywood films mostly wanted the second thing in small doses, which is why he never got a comedy of his own to carry.
Freeze Frame is the exception and the one to look for. It asks nothing of the clown and everything of the face, and it is the only time a film trusted him to be still. He has not made many since. The body of work is small and most of it is somebody else's film, but the man in the corner is usually the one worth watching.
Biography
Lee Evans is an English comedian, actor, musician and writer. Born on 25 February 1964 in Avonmouth, Bristol, he began performing stand-up in the late 1980s and won the Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1993.
Evans made his film debut in Funny Bones (1995). He appeared in the Hollywood comedies MouseHunt (1997), There's Something About Mary (1998) as Tucker, The Ladies Man (2000) and The Medallion (2003), as well as The Fifth Element (1997). He has also voiced characters in animated films and appeared in television series including Doctor Who (2009).
