The Book of Rannells: Some Thoughts on Andrew Rannells’s Movie Roles

Chronologically in Andrew Rannells’s career, we’re back up to A Simple Favor, so today’s post is going to be looking at his roles in movies. Rannells isn’t an actor who sticks mainly to one medium.  Certainly, he first gained acclaim through Broadway, and that’s probably the arena in which he’s most famous.  But he’s also had some good visibility and success from TV, which is largely what’s kept him from doing any open-ended Broadway runs since The Book of Mormon.  Additionally, voiceover work on animated shows paid his bills for a number of years, and he’s gotten back into that in recent years.  What you couldn’t call Rannells, though, is a film actor.

I’ve seen Rannells in five movies, which are all he’s been in so far other than a “headless stripper” in Sex and the City, wherein he had no lines (as such, I find no necessity to see it.)  And while each medium Rannells has worked in has had its share of better roles and lesser roles, with differing amounts of screen/stagetime or importance to the story at hand, his film roles offer little to recommend them – not bad or anything, just not much that gives him a chance to show off what he can do, nothing like the opportunities he’s had onstage or on the small screen.

The word that most often comes to mind when I think of Rannells in movie roles is “functional.”  The characters he plays aren’t so much characters as purposes, requirements of the plot or a quick joke.  Take Manny in Bachelorette – he’s ostensibly a friend/coworker of Isla Fisher’s Katie, but as soon as he plays his role in the inciting incident that kicks off the story in earnest, he disappears never to be heard from again.  In Why Him?, Blaine is a glorified cameo, just a reason to have Rannells do a bit of comedy with Casey Wilson, make Bryan Cranston’s character uncomfortable, and vanish into the ether.  Although his role as Cameron in The Intern is much larger, Jules’s number-two at the company and the one who keeps track of the many balls she’s juggling, Cameron as a person is basically a non-entity.  He’s utterly nondescript, someone who’s there to pop up and deliver exposition or move the plot along.

Of course, I get that not every character in every movie is going to be meaty or memorable.  But when you watch a film for the sake of a particular actor, it makes you notice how carelessly-written these more functional roles often are, simple means of getting from point A to point B instead of anything worthwhile.  And when the actor playing that role is a two-time Tony nominee who’s also been an important regular on more than one TV show?  It stands out even more.  I understand that it’s in part of reflection of the difference between “movie famous” and any other kind of famous for an actor, but I imagine there’s at least a measure of discrimination there as well.  It reminds me a little of the post that prefaced my A Little TLC(w) series; in thinking about what kind of roles Tony Leung Chiu-wai could get in Hollywood, I noted how Hollywood’s most well-known Asian-American actors tend to have far bigger TV credits than movie credits. The success of films like Crazy Rich Asians and Searching have hopefully started to shake something loose, but there are plenty of IMDb filmographies littered with major TV roles and bit parts in films, and while Rannells's experiences as a white gay actor aren't the same as that of Asian-American actors, I think a similar dynamic may be partially at play.

A Simple Favor is the first movie of Rannells’s that seemed, to me, to give him a character worth playing.  While his character, Darren, is still very functional, leading the Greek chorus of parents commenting on the lives of Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively’s characters, he’s also entertaining and memorable in his own right.  He has a number of hilarious lines and some consistency as a character, and he’s worth watching as more than just a means to a narrative end.  In short, he feels like an actual supporting character.

And now we have The Boys in the Band, the first of two Ryan Murphy-produced Netflix movies based on stage shows. The latter film, The Prom, won’t be coming out until later this month, and unlike The Boys in the Band, it features Rannells in a role he didn’t play onstage first, so I’m not sure what, if anything, I can auger about The Prom based on The Boys in the Band (we’ll know soon enough!) But I have all kinds of appreciation for the film of The Boys in the Band. As I said in my review, it’s just a fine film altogether, but as a Rannells fan, it combines the amazingness of the kind of work he can do onstage with the posterity of film. Which, basically, is everything I could want from a movie with Andrew Rannells in it. (Side note: even though Falsettos was filmed and released, I’m classifying it differently than The Boys in the Band and The Prom, since it was made as a filmed recording of a live stage show instead of an actual movie adaptation.) Unfortunately, the specific Broadway connection of these two movies doesn’t really signal to me that Rannells’s film career is headed toward bigger opportunities in general, but I know I’m glad to have gotten/be getting these movies. If only the film industry would start to recognize Rannells’s talent the way that Broadway and the world of TV have, I’d be one happy camper.