Dermot Mulroney blames the cake.
As sports reporter Michael O’Neal in My Best Friend’s Wedding, Mulroney expected many doors would fly open after his star turn.
“I was sitting there ready for the gift with purchase that was supposed to come along with being in a popular movie, and instead, I probably didn’t work for a year,” Mulroney tells the New York Times. “I chalked it up to me being so tiny on the poster, the little guy on the cake. I thought, gosh, you guys, if you’d made me a little bigger, maybe I could have gotten a job.”
Mulroney starred in the Oscar-nominated 1997 rom-com alongside Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and Rupert Everett. But he appeared in the movie poster as a tiny decoration atop a wedding cake (see below.)
The curse of the cake didn’t last forever. Mulroney has found success, and also returned to rom-coms in 2023, playing Sydney Sweeney’s father in Anyone but You.
Mulroney said he had some “fatherly” advice for that movie’s male lead, Glen Powell, after the cast gathered to watch My Best Friend’s Wedding.
“I didn’t want him to do what I did, which was minimize how important something is that might feel a little light or a little fluff when you’re doing it,” Mulroney told the Times. “‘What these movies mean to people,’ I told Glen, ‘will last for decades.’ It will last until after you’re gone in a way that maybe the other cool stuff he’s doing won’t. It has a different kind of absorption.”