Marc Maron Deserves Oscar Buzz for This Knockout Performance

Marc Maron is the first to say that he never wins awards. And it’s true that he’s been repeatedly snubbed by the Emmys and Golden Globes for both his acting work on shows like Netflix’s GLOW and his numerous stand-up specials, especially 2023’s grief-fueled From Bleak to Dark.

But if there is one role that should put him on a path to awards glory, it’s his first-ever lead performance in the new dark comedy In Memoriam, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month and is currently in search of a distributor.

“I didn’t!” he replied with a laugh. “I was an idiot. I should have. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Burnett also wishes that he had pretended from the start that he wrote the part of Langston Stanfield—a mid-tier actor and former sitcom star whose devastating cancer diagnosis drives him to become obsessed with getting in the Oscars’ In Memoriam montage—for Maron specifically.

“This character is so perfect for him that I made a mistake early in the press process by not just lying and saying that I wrote it for him, because I could have completely gotten away with that,” Burnett, who was responsible for booking Maron’s late-night stand-up debut on Letterman in 1996, explained.

But he says the minute his producer on the film suggested the idea, he thought, “My God, yes, why did I not think of Marc, he’s perfect for this!”

Beyond the fact that Maron, 62, would readily admit to sharing some of the character’s self-involved traits, Burnett saw his experience as a podcaster who interviewed thousands of guests over the course of a decade and a half as a unique asset.

“That podcast is driven by him listening, and you can feel how he’s listening, and that allows him to make those interviews so incredibly trenchant,” Burnett said. “So you have that, and then you have a comedian who has a clear understanding of the behavioral nuance of everything.”

“So you put those two things together, and then there’s only one step left, which is, can that guy who has all of those tools access his emotions honestly in order to perform this? And boy, did he ever!” he continued. “I mean, it was just beautiful to watch.”

While Maron is very much in the center of the frame, In Memoriam also boasts impressive performances from the 23-year-old Talia Ryder as his estranged daughter, along with Oscar-nominated actresses Lily Gladstone as his therapist and Sharon Stone as a former lover.

With a narrative arc that manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply moving, Maron’s is the type of performance that deserves to be recognized by the Academy—even if the size of the movie makes him a similar long shot to his character‘s quest to avoid the dreaded In Memoriam snub.

When I suggested this theory to Burnett, he replied, “Yeah, sure, absolutely. This is the first Oscar buzz I’ve heard. I love it!”

“To be clear, I wrote a movie about how professional legacy isn’t important in order to try to secure my own professional legacy,” he added. “So I’m a complete fraud, right?”