When Adam Scott landed an audition to play the biggest jerk in Step Brothers, his mind immediately went to the supermarket checkout lane. “It was so long ago that I thought of a magazine,” he said in an interview for my 2018 oral history of the movie. The glossy mag was called The Robb Report. Aimed at filthy-rich men and wannabe filthy-rich men, it featured photos of luxury vehicles, fancy clothes, big mansions, and super-yachts. Before going to meet with director Adam McKay, Scott bought himself an issue.
“It was guys with suits on, on tarmacs in front of private jets, in their sports cars, in their sunglasses, with their slicked back hair,” he said. “They were super serious. That’s sort of where my mind went. It was really funny. All you had to do was put a little spin on it.”
There’s nothing quite like a character you love to hate. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Jerks Week at The Ringer. Vote for your favorite ones in the Best Pop Culture Jerks Bracket, and check back throughout the week for a selection of stories on one of the most underrated archetypes.
That was exactly how Scott pictured the character he was reading for. Derek Huff, overachieving younger brother to Will Ferrell’s Brennan, is the vice president of the biggest executive helicopter-leasing company on the western seaboard. He claims he hasn’t eaten a carb since 2004. He’s arrogant, condescending, and homophobic. He goes bonito fishing with Bobby Flay, Chris Daughtry, Jeff Probst, and Mark Cuban and can’t stop talking about it.
Scott recalled referring to the Mavericks owner as “the Cubes” in his audition for Derek—one of the many small, toolish touches that got him the part. “God, he is so good at playing an A-hole,” McKay told me in 2018. “He had all these little, subtle moves that he was doing. In the room they’re not bowling you over, but they really played well on camera. Thank God we ended up casting him.”
Scott does the impossible in the hit 2008 comedy: He steals scenes from Ferrell and John C. Reilly. And though Scott hasn’t reached that height of cinematic dickishness since, Derek will always be one of the roles he’s best known for. That’s the power of being able to play a great jerk: People will remember you.
Being likably unlikable can sustain and jump-start careers in Hollywood. Ben Affleck worked his way up to stardom by embodying aggressive creeps in School Ties and Dazed and Confused. He later had a renaissance as a middle-aged shady dude, playing one in Gone Girl and State of Play. Julia Louis-Dreyfus gifted the world two of the most self-centered, most insensitive, and funniest characters in television history in Elaine Benes on Seinfeld and Selina Meyer on Veep. (At least Elaine didn’t have the power to influence federal policy.) Ben Stiller has been good at playing strange jerks for a long time, from odious fitness guru Tony Perkis in Heavyweights to sadistic orderly Hal in Happy Gilmore to the titular male model in Zoolander to gym owner White Goodman in Dodgeball to fading action star Tugg Speedman in Tropic Thunder.
Unsurprisingly, though, not all A-listers are comfortable making even the occasional foray into sleaze. That’s usually left to character actors who spend years skillfully pretending to be slimy. It’s not an easy job. Because once you get that reputation, it can be hard to shake—whether you like it or not. Seann William Scott played the (ultimately) good-hearted meathead lax bro Steve Stifler in four American Pie movies. He lost count of the times he met fratty young men who thought he was his character in real life. “They would realize that I was nothing like that and it was kind of fucking up their universe,” Scott told me for a 2019 interview. “I’d always see confusion. Their circuits firing off and then there was always a little bit of sadness. It was kind of breaking their heart because they had this idea of how I’d be. Sometimes I was like, ‘I don’t want to break their heart.’ So I would say something outlandish. And they were like, ‘Oh yeah, OK.’ And then I’d just walk away. These guys have given me a career. I can’t crush their spirit.”
Being a jerk is fun. James Spader gets it. He’s played a lot of them: rich kid Steff McKee in Pretty in Pink, drug dealer Rip in Less Than Zero, voyeur Graham in Sex, Lies, and Videotape, violent fetishist James Ballard in Crash, Michael Scott’s intense replacement Robert California in The Office, and most recently, Raymond Reddington in procedural The Blacklist. “I’m most drawn to characters who are compelling and repellant at the same time, very often right at the same moment, and who are frightening and funny all at once,” he told The New York Times in 2009.
Performances like these take a special kind of self-assured vulnerability. If you want to pull off on-screen loathsomeness like Spader does, you can’t be afraid to look overanxious or mean or ridiculous or evil. The best jerks are deeply committed jerks.
In 1988, Alan Rickman splashed onto the scene as the erudite East German terrorist mastermind Hans Gruber in Die Hard. “He was so soft-spoken and so sweet,” director John McTiernan told The Hollywood Reporter after Rickman’s death in 2016. “But he had such a gift for playing such terrifying people.” It was the actor’s idea to dress John McClane’s foil in a suit, not tactical gear. A smart, non-stereotypically dressed bad guy is, after all, a scarier, more interesting bad guy.
Rickman went on to play a string of morally questionable and/or sarcastic men, from the sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood to Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series to Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest. “It must have all been a reversal,” McTiernan added. “In his imagination, he must have been somewhere so vulnerable to cruel and evil people and felt so frightened of them that it gave him this amazing gift for constructing them. It was just astonishing.”
Of course, not all movie and TV jerks are as malevolent as Hans Gruber. Some, like the smarmy huckster Mayor Vaughn in Jaws, are more … foolish. Director Steven Spielberg found the perfect person for the insecure politician in Murray Hamilton, who played his character with hurricane-level bluster. “Murray could be sleazy and a villain, but he was also a sympathetic human being,” Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottlieb told Uproxx in 2020. “He had humanity. He was trying to quit smoking. He really was concerned for the welfare of the town.”
Some jerks are just pathetic. For an actor, that can be a difficult assignment. In True Lies, there’s a mustached used-car salesman named Simon. He cons suburban housewives into sleeping with him by pretending to be a spy. When director James Cameron was casting the movie, he was worried that he couldn’t find someone who could get serious enough to sell Jamie Lee Curtis’s character on a fake undercover alias without undermining his true greaseball identity. Then Bill Paxton auditioned for the role.
“I had to be very earnest in the part where I have to convince her that I’m a secret agent and all that, and if that didn’t come across, then it would make her character look foolish,” the late Paxton told The A.V. Club in 2012. “That was a big concern of Jim’s, and I prevailed.”
Paxton got the part—and the action-comedy’s biggest laughs. When actual agents, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold, finally bust Simon, he crumbles, and Paxton delivers the perfect confession: “I’m not a spy. I’m nothing. I’m navel lint! I have to lie to women to get laid, and I don’t score much. I got a little dick, it’s pathetic!”
Thankfully, most people who play movie jerks aren’t real-life jerks. But some of the actors who are best at it have sprinkled bits of themselves and their past experiences into their characters. Remember Elaine’s famous shove in Seinfeld? You know, the one she often incredulously hits her friends with?
According to Ariel Levy’s 2018 New Yorker profile of Louis-Dreyfus, she would do the same thing in college. “The way that she would shove guys—that’s the way she had to treat us,” Paul Barrosse, who was in an improv comedy group with her at Northwestern, told the magazine. “That kind of physicality was on display very early. … There’d be, like, seven male cast members and two female. I and some of the other senior guys in that show were like the 800-pound gorillas in the room, with huge egos, and she really stood up to that.”
It turns out Louis-Dreyfus developed her confrontational energy long before that. As a kid in the early ’70s, she watched Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker and Bea Arthur’s Maude spar on All in the Family. The debate—unapologetic feminist vs. unabashed bigot—hooked her on the sitcom. “All in the Family informed my life without my knowing it,” Louis-Dreyfus told Variety in 2019. “I was devoted to it as a kid, and I watched it religiously. I adored it. But without realizing it, it informed me as a performer. Carroll O’Connor played the most horrific person that you adored. And I think I’ve made a career of playing lovable assholes.”
On the other hand, Thomas F. Wilson became famous for playing a jerk who isn’t very lovable. Biff Tannen is more the kind of jerk you love to hate. The comedic actor played several different versions of the iconic lunkhead (and his kin) across the Back to the Future trilogy. Wilson is nothing like Biff, but growing up, he knew plenty of Biffs. So becoming Biff on-screen wasn’t all that daunting. “A thin and sickly kid, I was pushed around and beaten up by bullies throughout my childhood, until I grew bigger than everybody and it stopped,” Wilson told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “I knew very well how they operate, and specifically the joy they take in scaring people. I’d stared them in the face so often that it wasn’t particularly challenging to do an impression.”
Sometimes an impression isn’t needed. When Vince Vaughn first flipped through Jon Favreau’s Swingers script, the main character’s slick best friend Trent sounded familiar. “The phraseology, the way that he talked, was all characters I would slip into at times,” Vaughn told GQ in 2020. “That stuff was all stuff that I had actually said. So it was kind of odd reading it originally.” Even though “not everything that happens in the movie was what happened in real life,” Vaughn added, the role was perfect for him. He’s gone on to play several more Trent descendants, from Jeremy Grey in Wedding Crashers to Gary Grobowski in The Break-Up.
But even if you’re not already a jerk, jerkishness can be learned, honed, and perfected. In the ’90s, Ben Stiller started playing jerks and turned it into a decade-long hobby. His shtick was usually funny, even if it wasn’t always evolving. Take, for example, his role in Dodgeball: “It all kind of comes from the Tony Robbins impression that I tried to do on The Ben Stiller Show, and then it became Tony Perkis from Heavyweights and then it morphed into White Goodman,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2020. “I don’t have that many moves, really. It’s funny because once you do the makeup and get the wig on, then you’re suddenly like, ‘Oh yeah, I got this.’”
Soon after American Pie hit theaters in the summer of 1999, Seann William Scott became famous. But many of his teenage fans, of which there were probably millions, didn’t know his real name. To them, he was just “Stifler.” Being mononymous didn’t bother Scott. “It never occurred to me that I would be in a movie people would remember,” he told me. “Or know my name, or know the character’s name, or start saying dialogue that maybe I made up on set. It was amazing.”
Naturally, the first movie Scott was offered after American Pie was another sex comedy: Road Trip. The role he was up for—I challenge you to remember his name—sounded just like Stifler, only he was in college. Scott happily took the part. “I was like, ‘Who gives a shit? These characters are so much fuckin’ fun,’” he said. “I’d rather be the guy who says outlandish shit than the boring guy.” (The character’s name was E.L. Faldt.)
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Playing a jerk can pay your bills. It can make you a household name. But being typecast as one can be exhausting. Wilson has said that he’s proud of his performance as Biff, but at one point he felt the need to type up a Back to the Future primer to hand out to fans. They always had the same questions. Here’s a sampling from the fact sheet: “Michael J. Fox is nice.” “The hoverboards didn’t really fly, we were hanging by wires from a crane.” “The manure was made of peat moss, cork, dirt, and a food agent that made it sticky.” “I coined the term, ‘butthead,’ as well as ‘Make like a tree, and get out of here.’”
Also, for his stand-up act, Wilson wrote a tune about fan queries. “They shake my hand and never ask my name,” he sings. “And they start asking questions that are always the same.” A YouTube video of him performing the song has 4.6 million views.
Paxton seemed to be at peace with the fact that some moviegoers will always know him as Chet, the doltish, flat-topped older brother from Weird Science. “People like to bust actors like me and take us down by saying, ‘Oh, yeah, Chet in Weird Science,’” said Paxton, who claimed that director John Hughes modeled Buzz from Home Alone on Chet. “It’s a passive-aggressive thing. But I’m very proud of Chet. One thing about Chet was, he might’ve been an A-hole, but he was an A-hole you respected.” And then he laughed.
In the end, it’s better to be remembered for playing a jerk than it is to be forgotten. They’ll always be fun roles for actors to play. And movies and TV shows wouldn’t be nearly as interesting without them. Or as realistic. The year after Step Brothers came out, ABC’s Shark Tank premiered. Adam Scott was watching an episode one night when a fratty contestant called panelist Mark Cuban “the Cubes.”
“By Mark Cuban’s expression, I think he was a little sick of it,” Scott said. “I’m pretty proud of that.”
