The Sundance Film Festival is currently in full swing, giving industry professionals the chance to freeze their extremities while waiting to see a mid-budget dramedy about a family overcoming tragedy with quirkiness.
One of the most talked about movies at the festival so far is If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a reportedly “harrowing” story of motherhood starring Rose Byrne and… Conan O’Brien?
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Yes, the future Oscar host has a supporting role in the film which was written and directed by Mary Bronstein, and produced by Josh Safdie of “making you deeply uncomfortable with Safdie Brothers movies” fame.
While he’s not the star of the film, a lot of comedy fans are understandably most curious about Conan’s performance, considering that he’s not exactly known for drama (with the exception of all the Tonight Show drama from 2009).
The early word out of Sundance is that O’Brien is very good. “Conan O’Brien gives a fine turn as Linda’s weary therapist,” read one review published by Screen Daily. Vanity Fair noted that the former late night host was “great” in the role. In IndieWire’s review, critic David Ehrlich called Conan’s character “a dead fish of a man,” adding that “Bronstein’s decision to cast the role with a pathological extrovert like Conan O’Brien is a stroke of genius, as there’s a vertigo-like queasiness to watching the funniest man in America fight so hard to smother every conceivable laugh.”
The only person who wasn’t impressed by O’Brien’s performance, it would seem, was O’Brien. “I feel like a complete fraud,” the predictably self-deprecating star told the audience following the screening.
Bronstein revealed to Variety that, after he read the script, Conan told her, “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know if I can do this. If I suck, you can fire me. We’ll still be friends. It’s okay.” Instead of firing him, the director worked closely with him. “I actually did an intensive rehearsal process with him in L.A., where we worked together for three or four hours every day for a week in his podcast offices. It was quite intense. It was like a theater workshop, and he was a dream.
Of course, it’s not as though Conan has never acted before. For one thing he’s randomly shown up in multiple international soap operas.
And he briefly played the role of Andy Warhol in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
And while If I Had Legs I’d Kicked You is being heralded as his first dramatic project, we’d like to point out that it really doesn’t get any more dramatic than being decapitated by a “Sharktopus” and suffering the further indignity of having your severed head be used as a ball in a game of beach volleyball — all of which happened in the 2014 SyFy Channel movie Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda.
Let’s just say “being capable at acting” is yet another way that Conan O’Brien is better than Jay Leno.