Catherine Keener
Catherine Keener is an actor, born 1959.
Catherine Keener, born in Miami in 1959, has built a thirty-year career out of being the most interesting person in scenes she is not headlining. Her range is narrower than the word versatile suggests and much deeper: disgruntled, watchful, melancholy women, usually smarter than the men around them and rarely rewarded for it. She has two Academy Award nominations, a British Academy Film Award nomination, two Golden Globe nominations and a Primetime Emmy nomination, all for supporting work.
The specific thing she does is weaponise contempt. As Maxine in Being John Malkovich she flirts by insulting people, and the film's whole engine is that two adults find this irresistible; the performance is icy, funny and entirely without vanity, and it got her the first Oscar nomination. The second came for Capote, where she plays Harper Lee as the only person in the room with a working conscience. Comedy works the same way for her: Trish in The 40 Year Old Virgin is warm because Keener plays her as an adult with her own problems rather than a prize, and Get Out later took exactly that warmth and made it clinical.
She is also one of the great collaborators. Charlie Kaufman used her three times, Nicole Holofcener built several films around her, and she keeps turning up in studio pictures, Captain Phillips, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, the Croods films, doing the unshowy work of making the lead's situation feel real. It is a career assembled from character parts, and very few leading roles have aged as well.
Movies (56)
- Get Out (2017)
- Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)
- Incredibles 2 (2018)
- The Croods (2013)
- Captain Phillips (2013)
- The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)
- Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)
- The Croods: A New Age (2020)
- Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
- The Adam Project (2022)
- Into the Wild (2007)
- Trust (2010)
- Begin Again (2014)
- Being John Malkovich (1999)
- The Interpreter (2005)
- Adaptation. (2002)
- Synecdoche, New York (2008)
- Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
- Out of Sight (1998)
- Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013)
- S1m0ne (2002)
- Catchfire (1990)
- An American Crime (2007)
- Capote (2005)
- The Soloist (2009)
- Death to Smoochy (2002)
- About Last Night... (1986)
- Please Give (2010)
- Friends with Money (2006)
- Enough Said (2013)
TV (6)
Where to start with Catherine Keener
Nothing explains her faster than Being John Malkovich. Maxine is the role that defines the register, cruelty played as charisma, and the film around it is still the strangest thing a studio funded that decade. Then Capote, where she does the opposite: no edge, all judgement, standing slightly apart from a man she can see going wrong.
For the comic side, The 40 Year Old Virgin is the one that proves she can carry warmth without going soft, and Enough Said and Please Give are the Holofcener films where the writing finally matches what she can do with ordinary discontent. Get Out is the late-career trump card, a performance built almost entirely on hospitality. If you want the deep cut, Living in Oblivion is her earliest great one, an indie about making an indie, and she is very funny in it.
The Nicole Holofcener films
Five collaborations across twenty years, and the best sustained record of what she does. Holofcener writes women who are irritated by their own lives and Keener plays that without ever asking for sympathy.
The surreal ones
Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze and the films that share their wiring. Being John Malkovich is the definitive Keener performance, contemptuous and magnetic in the same breath, and Synecdoche is the saddest.
The nineties independents
Before the Oscar nominations she was the face of a particular kind of American independent film, working repeatedly with Tom DiCillo. Living in Oblivion is the funniest and Your Friends and Neighbors is the cruellest.
The studio supporting roles
Where most people have actually seen her, usually as the one adult in the film who has noticed something. Get Out uses her warmth as the weapon, and Capote gives her Harper Lee as the room's only grown-up.