admin From the beginning of his career, casting has been Wes Anderson’s greatest strength. He’s had an incredible trajectory, graduating from his roots of simply using the performers available to him within a three block radius of the flop house on Throckmorton Street in Dallas he was sharing with similarly broke friends (including Owen Wilson, and occasionally his little brother Luke) when he made a short film about two Texas shitheels suffering from terminal ennui who half-heartedly take up a life of crime.
Then he somehow cajoled James Caan to come on for a few scenes as an antagonist in the feature-length treatment of that short, Bottle Rocket, purely off its performance at Sundance. With each subsequent project, Anderson raised his game, the stakes, and the world-building of his films as his star tonnage increased impossibly and exponentially: He discovered Jason Schwartzman, he resuscitated Bill Murray, he got the last truly great performance out of Gene Hackman, he got the best Gwyneth Paltrow performance to date. Some of the movies were great, some forgettable. All were meticulous scale models about characters swaddled in white privilege: a working-class, brilliant E.L. Konigsburg/Salinger worshiper’s idea of what a rich coastal family is like. And in each successive film, the call sheet would burn brighter than the last.
Anderson is a filmmaker who historically seems most comfortable around familiar faces, returning to the same actors over and over again, occasionally indoctrinating new faces into the fold and making them a part of the team. For the criticisms he’s faced as an icy and impersonal writer, he clearly has forged loyalty and enduring love among a community of actors he returns to time and time again.
Asteroid City (now available to stream on Peacock) may be the first time we’ve seen the inevitable stressors this case of “Too Many Guys” can have on even the most talented filmmaker. By packing his cast so deep, the obvious need to give, say, Steve Carell something to do in a film that should be closer to a four-hander challenges the nature of story structure itself. Anderson’s latest film suggests the clout of being able to get legends of screen to stand in as glorified extras for his films is threatening to swallow his work whole.
What we here at GQ decided to examine was Anderson’s facility as a Pat Riley–esque executive, not just at procuring superstars, but how effectively they’ve been utilized across his 11 films. A brief aside on methodology: We set the bar at a minimum of two Anderson films to qualify. To be clear, this ranking is not an evaluation of general talent, but facility within the Wes Anderson Cinematic Universe.
So, friends, throw on your go-to, well-tailored summer seersucker suit, grab a rum cannonball, and let’s dive deep into Wes Anderson’s wide world of brilliant friends and coworkers.
25. Harvey Keitel
Films (3): Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs
Best Role: Moonrise Kingdom
Notes: Scorsese’s first muse, the Bad Lieutenant himself, merely played a Boy Scout commander and a prisoner sight gag with a handful of lines. Jay-Z contributed more to “Pop Style” than Keitel has to Anderson’s films. A crying shame.
24. Bob Balaban
Films (5): Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City
Best Role: Moonrise Kingdom
Notes: It’s insane the great Bob Balaban has been in five Wes Anderson movies with so little to do—his contribution to The French Dispatch is just two scenes sitting on a couch. That’s it.
23. Liev Schreiber
Films (3): Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City
Best Role: Isle of Dogs
Notes: Schreiber is basically the second lead in Anderson’s weakest film, Isle of Dogs. But he’s an actual liability in Asteroid City, whose side plot contributes little besides a distraction from the main story of two families struggling with grief and loss.
22. Waris Ahluwalia
Films (3): The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, The Grand Budapest Hotel
Best Role: The Darjeeling Limited
Notes: Ahluwalia appears briefly in three Anderson films, most significantly in Darjeeling as a persnickety dickhead cuckold train conductor. A great beard attached to a great face that deserved more to do.
21. Seu Jorge
Films (2): Life Aquatic, Asteroid City
Best Role: Life Aquatic
Notes: In many ways, the Brazilian singer-songwriter is the most interesting part of Life Aquatic. But then again, Seu Jorge singing Bowie is pretty hard to fuck up.
20. Bryan Cranston
Films (2): Isle of Dogs, Asteroid City
Best Role: Isle of Dogs
Notes: There isn’t really a lead in Isle of Dogs, but if you had to pick one, it would probably be Cranston, which is how he leaps ahead of a few actors on this list (particularly Balaban). His role in Asteroid City is essentially a reprisal of the Balaban role in Moonrise Kingdom, complete with a fourth-wall-breaking episode as the Our Town stage manager, appropriate for a film that borrows much more from Wilder than Moonrise did—but Balaban’s part was meatier.
19. Brian Cox
Films (2): Rushmore, Fantastic Mr. Fox
Best Role: Rushmore
Notes: A single line in Mr. Fox qualifies Brian Cox for this list, but he deserves it for his role in Rushmore as yet another irritable loving-yet-admonishing force in Max Fischer’s life. His performance when he’s disturbed from a coma by the voice of his life antagonist is alone worthy of inclusion.
18. Kara Hayward
Films (2): Moonrise Kingdom, Isle of Dogs
Best Role: Moonrise Kingdom
Notes: A bit role in Dogs gets her here. You could be forgiven for noting Hayward’s wardrobe and makeup and concluding her character Suzy is a cut-and-paste job from The Royal Tenenbaums, little Margot plucked from the Upper West Side and plopped down on a remote island off the New England coast. But Suzy isn’t that. She’s allowed to be vulnerable and goofy and childlike in a way few Anderson children had been permitted to be before, alongside her goofy and vulnerable love interest. This is both the strength and weakness of the character, a refreshing change up for the director who likes his kids as small adults, precocious and turned cold by trauma, but also makes for an occasionally grating and somewhat clunky performance on rewatches.
