In 2007, just as the Oscar voting period reached its end, Eddie Murphy released Norbit. The immortal tale of a gawky dweeb (Murphy) married to a morbidly obese woman (also Murphy), Norbit was such an earth-shaking failure that many theorised it actively lost Murphy his once all-but-guaranteed Oscar for Dreamgirls.
Flash forward to 2026, and the Eddie Murphy of today may well be Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley, her Norbit being Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein redo The Bride!, her “morbidly obese woman” a cackling 1930s flapper possessed by the ghost of Mary Shelley. The Bride! has received an energetic drubbing, with Buckley described as giving a performance “so astonishingly poor and so catastrophically ill-judged that it almost needs to be seen to be believed”. And that was in The Times! Could it really be bad enough to kill her Oscar chances?
