A great movie cameo can be delightful, but a terrible one can have even a great movie leaving a sour taste in your mouth (that’s especially true for great 2023 comedies). Movie cameos are designed to provide a spark of recognizability for members of the audience, and they often exist to poke fun at the star who is making the cameo.
That means that a great cameo, almost by necessity, requires someone who is game to poke a little light fun at themselves. We’ve pulled together seven cameos that genuinely work, in part because they fit with the overall tone of the movie, and because they’re still remembered years after they actually happened.
7. Brad Pitt (Deadpool 2)
Pitt’s cameo in Deadpool 2 is a cameo in the truest sense of the word. When Deadpool assembles the X-Force to take on Cable, one of the central characters is Vanisher who is (perhaps obviously) invisible.
Because the character is invisible, we don’t know who is playing him until the X-Force is killed, which is when we discover that Vanisher was Brad Pitt the whole time. Pitt’s cameo only took a couple of hours to film, but it was still the funniest possible reveal.
6. Keith Richards (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End)
Johnny Depp pretty obviously based his performance as Captain Jack Sparrow on the behavior of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. Depp’s loose and mumbly imitation was so comically precise that it earned him an Oscar nomination.
When Richards shows up as Captain Jack’s father in At World’s End, everything just made sense. It made Depp’s impression into part of the plot of the movie. Like father, like son.
5. Donald Glover (Spider-Man: Homecoming)
Donald Glover had a long-running and vigorous campaign to be cast as the next Spider-Man, and it’s a campaign he obviously lost. Glover’s consolation, though, was a small and hilarious part in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Glover has two real scenes in the film playing Aaron Davis, a local criminal who has a small role in the Vulture’s scheme. The two scenes teh actor gets were a nice full circle moment for Glover. He may never have gotten to play Spider-Man, but he got to steal the show in a Spider-Man movie.
4. Matt Damon (Eurotrip)
Matt Damon is the king of the modern cameo. From Interstellar to Thor: Ragnarok, Damon will show up any at time, and almost all of his appearances are a delight. The defining Damon cameo came early in his career, though, when he showed up in Eurotrip.
The cameo was surprising in part because of the relatively small scale of the movie, and because it came after Damon’s star had fully bloomed. Even so, it remains one of the funniest cameos in movie history, in large part because it includes a performance of the famous Scotty Doesn’t Know.
3. Keanu Reeves (Always Be My Maybe)
Keanu Reeves’ career resurgence is one of the great joys of the last 10 years, and it really came to head in Always Be My Maybe. Keanu plays a version of himself in the movie, and the entire joke of the movie is that there’s essentially nothing wrong with the man.
As an actor, Keanu was often knocked for being inflexible and rigid, but his performances here proves that he knows exactly what he’s doing. He shows that he can manipulate his star persona to turn what is usually a pretty serious one into something far more comedic.
2. Bill Murray (Zombieland)
Perhaps the single most surprising and funniest cameo in movie history, Bill Murray’s surprising appearance in Zombieland is still the high watermark for comedy cameos. Murray is playing himself here, and he’s discovered that he can survive the zombie apocalypse if he simply makes himself up like a zombie and moves around the world as if he were one.
Basically everything Murray says during his stretch of the film is hilarious, and the movie also understands exactly how much it should deploy him, giving him a “gracious” exit at the exact right moment.
1. Stan Lee (a bunch of MCU movies)
Perhaps the most brilliant thing that Stan Lee did to shore up his legacy as Marvel’s godfather was to make a cameo in basically every Marvel property. Lee shows up in every Marvel movie through Avengers: Endgame (which was released after his death), and also appears in a bunch of Marvel projects outside of the MCU.
While the cameos range pretty wildly in scope, many of them are a delightful reminder of the comics that all of these Marvel properties come from. While Lee doesn’t deserve as much credit as he often took, the cameos themselves were widely beloved for a reason, so much so that fan theories even emerged around them.
