Kate McKinnon Deserves to Be a Major Movie Star

Make a list of the top 5 funniest people working in entertainment today, and you’d be a fool not to include Kate McKinnon. The two-time Emmy winner has been the class of Saturday Night Live for for at least half of her eight seasons on the show. A dynamic presence with a gift for impersonation and lunacy, McKinnon’s talent comes along once in a blue moon. So why is it taking so long to make her a movie star? This is in no way meant to slight McKinnon’s work, particularly in films like the Ghostbusters remake and this year’s underrated and zippy The Spy Who Dumped Me. But once-in-a-generation talent should be getting the opportunity to lead films, not play wacky second banana. And the results should be … better, all around.

The expectation game for any breakout Saturday Night Live star has always been a gauntlet. Ever since those original SNL players Bill Murray, Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Chevy Chase all jumped off from those Not Ready for Primetime Players days to become legit movie stars and (along with later SNL stars Eddie Murphy, Mike Meyers, Adam Sandler, and Will Ferrell) the faces of American comedy film for the better part of three decades, the expectations on SNL stars to jump off and rule the cinematic comedy scene have been hugely inflated. Even over the past dozen years, as the Apatow ascendance brought the seat of power for American comedy outside of Studio 8H, that sense that SNL stars owed it to the universe to transition into movie stardom has persisted.

Lately, that pipeline hasn’t been quite so direct. Someone like Amy Poehler (and more recently, Bill Hader in Barry) has kept to television work to keep her star power potent, while Maya Rudolph has bounced from indie film to TV to voice work to variety shows so much that she’s made herself impossible to pin down. Kristen Wiig has made the possibly savvy choice to take increasingly unexpected roles outside of what we all thought her wheelhouse was (dark indies like Nasty Baby and The Diary of a Teenage Girl; full-on horror movies like mother!).

But McKinnon seems to be making a run at comedy movies directly. The results have just been decidedly mixed. Besides the bit parts and (typically strong, given her talents) voice work in animated features like Ferdinand and Finding Dory, the films have been second-tier stuff like Office Christmas Party (a subject literally executed better as an SNL sketch) and Rough Night (which froze to death in the cold shadow of Girls Trip). McKinnon’s two best film performances are maybe the most instructive for the kind of comedic force she can be in movies: as the enigmatic Holtzmann in Ghostbusters, McKinnon was an absolute scene-stealer and easily the highlight of a cast that included Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, and Leslie Jones.

It’s a performance that perfectly capitalizes on everything we love about McKinnon: her exquisite strangeness, her gift for being the only thing on screen you have to keep an eye on at all times, even her queer sensibility, which is something even SNL struggles to foreground enough. By its very nature, it’s a performance that must be doled out sparingly, lest the entire movie be overpowered. The temptation to say is that that’s the problem with Movie Kate: the kind of funny she brings to the table is never best suited to be the main course.

That would explain The Spy Who Dumped Me, where McKinnon plays the delightfully strange bestie to Mila Kunis as the pair of them run all over Europe playing spy games and trying not to get killed. Both actresses are a delight, and McKinnon’s Morgan is both inappropriately forthright and also enjoys a too-candid relationship with her parents. But there’s never any question that this is Kunis’s movie. She’s the lead, she gets the arc, she gets the screen time, she gets (one assumes) the bigger trailer and heftier paycheck.

Still, it feels like we’re losing out with Kate McKinnon stuck in second-banana purgatory. Doesn’t she deserve better? Don’t we? It’s not like there aren’t careers that serve as examples for McKinnon to take the lead. Will Ferrell spent several years playing the too-strange-to-be-the-lead character in movies like Zoolander (Mugatu!) and Old School (Frank the Tank) before studios started tailoring movies to him, starting with Elf at the end of 2003 and then Anchorman in 2004. An even more recent and proximate example is Melissa McCarthy, who played the peppy best friend on Gilmore Girls and Samantha Who for years before finally getting that breakthrough in Bridesmaids, Oscar nomination and all. And, once again, the roles molded to fit her. Bridesmaids was great and all, but Melissa McCarthy wouldn’t be the comedic force she is today if Paul Feig and Katie Dippold hadn’t written her the perfect role opposite Sandra Bullock in The Heat. A role that could have easily been made secondary in importance to Bullock’s on the grounds that Mullins was too extreme and Ashburn was more of a traditional lead. The Heat says screw that and is the much better movie for it.

This is what Kate McKinnon needs. She needs her The Heat. Her Elf. The movie that is tailored to her particular oddball appeal and puts it front and center where she belongs.

Where to stream The Spy Who Dumped Me