Recurring Wes Anderson Actors, Definitively Ranked
The answer is that Fiennes’ interpretation of M. Gustave is simply the greatest single performance on this list. Not just in sheer star power, though it very much has that from an actor with as much skill and power as anyone below, but in its interpretation and understanding of the statement Anderson wanted to make in his big statement film, what he’d been working towards his entire career. Gustave is pretentious and refined and a dignified professional with immaculate taste, but warm and funny and a little slimy. Once Wes got all of his baggage and grade-school influences out of his system, he became a mature artist, and Gustave, aided by Fiennes, is the realization of his voice, his sensibility, and his value system as that artist. A perfect synthesis of a genius performer and a genius writer/director.
3. Owen Wilson
Films (7): Bottle Rocket, The Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch
Best Role: Bottle Rocket
Notes: Anderson’s first writing partner, Wilson is one of the only actors that are given rope to be consistently strange and surprising in his readings and deliveries, not beholden to what has become a kind of house acting style of soul weary pain via loss delivered in monotone.
As Dignan, he’s the source code for the Anderson cinematic universe, a moron trying to use the bonds of friendship and cobbled-together family to force order on chaos, even as he serves as a chaos agent upsetting the “natural” order of life. Anderson has been characterized (and has caricatured himself, in a classic AMEX commercial) as a dictator on set, the kind you have to be to maintain his painterly frames. Dignan is both a Wes avatar and the anti-Wes, a micromanager running an exact schedule for himself and those around him for a train about to run off an unfinished bridge into the bottom of a ravine, supremely confident and blissfully unaware he’s a numbnuts, a spacey existentialist and homey good ol’ boy with his still-prominent Dallas drawl.
2. Bill Murray
Films (8): Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The French Dispatch, The Phoenician Scheme
Best Role: Rushmore
Notes: Hard to say where Wes Anderson or Bill Murray would occupy the space they currently do in the culture if either man hadn’t made the decision to gamble on one another in 1998. On Rushmore, Murray took a 1990s SAG day rate—Anderson estimates he made around $9,000 total—for a project that ended up changing both their lives.
No one is better than Murray at Anderson’s odd house blend of intellectual, articulate profanity and deadpan melancholy. Maybe Anderson does his best writing with Murray in mind, or maybe Murray was born to deliver his dialogue; either way, at this point they’re a symbiotic unit. In Anderson’s films, Murray is both dignified and coarse, pompous and absurd, a loving selfish brute cutting through the pretensions and formality of polite society. Perhaps Anderson and Murray didn’t invent this archetype: the magnetic, irascible, irresistible disappointment-sponge/father figure, but together (with an early assist from Gene Hackman), they perfected it. It is fitting that in their latest film together, Anderson drops all pretenses and at last casts Murray as a gigantic, literal God.
1. Jason Schwartzman
Films (8): Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City
