In Netflix’s new crime drama, Legends, Steve Coogan plays a steely customs investigator intent on infiltrating a drugs gang, a task that carries with it a distinct risk to life. The very fact that Coogan – who will forever be associated with Alan Partridge, a man whose mid-life crisis prompted him to drive to Dundee barefoot while gorging on Toblerone – can pass himself off in such a role is remarkable. But then it’s also testament to a career-long tenacity that has seen him strive repeatedly to swerve stereotype.
Few actors are required to stay in their lane quite as much as comedic ones. If you are funny once, you’re funny for ever. Think of David Jason, Catherine Tate and, more recently, Jack Whitehall. Even if they do stray towards drama, they return to their comfort zones soon enough.
Not Coogan, though. Who else could play a buffoon and the reviled Jimmy Savile, and get away with both? Yes, his experiences in Hollywood have resulted in some very rum movies – 2018’s mulchy emotional drama Irreplaceable You, for one – but the 60-year-old’s CV nevertheless remains notably impressive given that he spent much of the 1990s shouting “A-ha!” in front of a live studio audience.
Here are his seven finest screen performances:
Philomena (2013)
This was perhaps the first indication that Coogan wanted to be viewed as a serious thespian. Philomena is an adaptation of the journalist Martin Sixsmith’s book about an Irish woman, Philomena Lee (played by Judi Dench), and her tireless search for the son she was forced to give up for adoption 50 years previously.
Coogan plays Sixsmith, a taciturn news journalist more used to warzones than emotional stories, but who quickly develops a bond with his subject nevertheless. He proves not only an able co-star to Dench, but was later nominated for an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay, a fact he likes to point out at the slightest opportunity, not least to Rob Brydon on The Trip.
Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube and Sky Store
Saxondale (2006-07)
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Coogan seemed doggedly determined to leave Partridge behind in favour of carving out new comedic niches, there were several misfires, subsequent creations revealed merely as Partridge knock-offs, or else very close cousins. If his obnoxious travelling salesman Gareth Cheeseman (who appeared in his 1995 series Coogan’s Run) was an example of the former, then Saxondale is the latter, a Partridge-adjacent middle-aged man increasingly at odds with modern life, and who can never quite outrun the geek within.
A former roadie, Tommy Saxondale owns a pest control business, and nurses persistent anger issues – but he does at least have the love of a good woman in new girlfriend Magz (Ruth Jones). It is their deeply felt – and deeply sexual – relationship that gives this overlooked BBC sitcom its surprisingly tender heart.
Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV and YouTube
I’m Alan Partridge (1997-2002)
There have been many incarnations of his most beloved television character over the years, but Alan Partridge was best when he was at his lowest ebb. I’m Alan Partridge revisits the BBC’s most hapless sports presenter-turned-failed chat show host following his disgraced exit from the BBC. He has reluctantly pivoted to radio, doing the graveyard shift on local Norwich radio. Currently between homes, he lives first in a roadside hotel, then a static caravan, his only friend a local petrol station attendant with an impenetrable Geordie accent.
But Alan is nothing if not eternally – one might say foolishly – optimistic for brighter days ahead, and convinces himself that he still has another shot at the big-time. If a game show revolving around monkey tennis, or youth hostelling with Chris Eubank, doesn’t usher in a renaissance for him, what will?
Streaming on ITVX Premium
Greed (2019)
While Coogan has proven himself capable of great subtlety, he is rarely more comfortable on-screen than when playing a larger than life character. Teaming up with Michael Winterbottom, with whom he had previously made 24 Hour Party People and A Cock and Bull Story, he plays Sir Richard McCreadie, a billionaire retail magnate whose fashion emporia have dressed Britain for decades (think Philip Green’s Topshop), but whose business is now beginning to collapse, taking his reputation with it.
McCreadie, who didn’t get where he is today by readily capitulating, decides to throw a mega party on the Greek island of Mykonos, where he believes that, like the phoenix, he will rise again. Coogan has enormous fun ostensibly playing second fiddle to a set of teeth so bright you could see them from the moon.
Available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Sky Store, Apple TV and YouTube
The Reckoning (2023)
This was surely going to be the television project that saw the ever-confident Coogan stretch himself too far, by impersonating Jimmy Savile in all his shell-suited, cigar-chomping horror. The story of the former Radio 1 DJ and television personality who hid his decades-long crimes of paedophilia – and, so it was rumoured, necrophilia – in plain sight, The Reckoning proved thoroughly unpleasant viewing at 9 o’clock on a weekday evening.
Coogan plays him from a young buck making his name in the 1960s up to his death in 2011, and not once does he slip into cheap imitation. If the drama itself made curiously scant impact, and is not fondly remembered, then that is surely because the subject matter continues to abhor. But its lead performance? Masterly.
Streaming on BBC iPlayer
Stan & Ollie (2018)
Perhaps his most nuanced cinematic role, this lovely and doleful biopic of comics Laurel and Hardy as they navigate the end of their career exemplifies, as with Savile, just how much Coogan can occasionally disappear into someone else’s skin entirely. Here, he not only offers his customary canny vocal impersonation, but actually becomes Stan Laurel, his face seeming to grow longer, his ears more pronounced, his gaze ever more forlorn. It’s eerie.
John C Reilly is terrific alongside him as the more ebullient Oliver Hardy, as the comedy legends arrive in 1950s England to reconnect with an otherwise dwindling fan base. There are echoes of Partridge here, another character who lives mostly on past glories; perhaps this is why Coogan seems to understand him quite so intuitively, and so well.
Streaming on BFI Player
The Trip (2010-)
Sometimes the funniest comedy is that which cuts closest to the bone. We’re back in Michael Winterbottom territory for what is billed as a thinly disguised autobiographical tale of two television comedians – Coogan and Rob Brydon, both playing versions of themselves – in a perpetual battle of one-upmanship. Over four series (a fifth is looming), the pair undertake a succession of gastronomic adventures across the UK, Italy, Spain and Greece for Coogan’s side hustle as a restaurant critic.
Over a lot of fine dining, and much daytime drinking, they bicker, compete in Roger Moore impressions, and thoroughly eviscerate one another with passive aggression. It is Brydon who emerges as the more comfortable in his skin, while Coogan wants only to assert his ultimate superiority and his greater finesse, determined that Brydon afford him the respect he feels he deserves.
Series one and two are streaming on BBC iPlayer. Series three and four are available to rent or buy on Prime Video
‘Legends’ is streaming on Netflix from Thursday 7 May