Melissa McCarthy can make a coarse joke funnier by refusing the smallest flicker of embarrassment. We rate her highly when a director gives that certainty someone to unsettle, and less when a script merely asks for more noise.
Fi1m perspective
In Bridesmaids (2011), Melissa McCarthy's Megan seems to have missed the instruction to feel awkward. Kristen Wiig is all anxious self-consciousness beside her, while McCarthy commits to being coarse without making little apologies for it. We laughed at Megan's lack of embarrassment because McCarthy makes it so complete: she never asks us to excuse her. Paul Feig gives the ensemble room to misbehave, and McCarthy is funny without needing the others to stand back.
The leading roles that followed Bridesmaids included The Heat (2013) and Spy (2015). Her physical comedy and willingness to play forceful, flawed women made that progression understandable. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018), in which she plays forger Lee Israel, took her into drama. It is an important turn in a career where the invitation to be loud can too easily become an instruction to repeat herself.
McCarthy uses clothes, wigs and props to build characters and find their voices. In The Little Mermaid (2023), her Ursula works through the shoulders and painted mouth, played as though she has a nightclub audience to entertain. ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls’ gives Rob Marshall's murky, overlong remake a welcome stretch of enjoyment. She is not especially frightening, and the performance cannot rescue the film, but her pleasure in the part is a virtue worth keeping.
The danger is repetition: a script can keep asking for the same loud behaviour. We need the people around McCarthy to have something equally definite to do, as Wiig and Rose Byrne do in Bridesmaids. Byrne's aggressive civility gives Megan's coarseness another useful contrast, so the joke need not always be that McCarthy is louder. Even there, scenes run too long; letting an ensemble play needs to come with a willingness to stop it. Start with Bridesmaids, provided a little comic overindulgence does not put you off.
Biography
Melissa Ann McCarthy is an American actress, comedian and producer. She began performing stand-up comedy in New York before joining the Groundlings improv troupe in Los Angeles in the late 1990s.
McCarthy first gained recognition for her role as Sookie St. James on the television series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007). She starred as Molly Flynn on the sitcom Mike & Molly (2010–2016), winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 2011. Her performance in the film Bridesmaids (2011) earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She has appeared in numerous comedies including The Heat (2013), Spy (2015) and Ghostbusters (2016), and received a second Oscar nomination for Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). In 2023 she played Ursula in the live-action film The Little Mermaid.
McCarthy frequently collaborates with her husband, actor and director Ben Falcone, through their production company On the Day Productions.
