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The 5 most memorable Kristen Wiig performances

When discussing the most significant movies Kristen Wiig has appeared in, you likely won’t include “Nasty Baby,” opening Friday.

So let’s look back at the most memorable efforts in which the “SNL” alum showed what a good actress and/or comedic performer she is, depending on your definition of “memorable.” And your definition of “five,” since there’s technically six here. (P.S. If you do see “Nasty Baby,” see it early, because Wiig will participate in Q&As after the 5 and 8 p.m. screenings Friday and Saturday at the Music Box Theatre.)

“Adventureland” (2009)

The miniature precursor to a later, much more extensive big-screen collaboration with fellow “Saturday Night Live” ace Bill Hader, Wiig’s role is small and muted as half of the pair (Hader playing the other half) who run the theme park where the happiness of its employees goes to die. But it’s a glimpse into how much she can do with only a little, earning laughs quietly on the sidelines, a nice difference from many of her much louder characters on “SNL.”

“Extract” (2009)

Establishing sweatpants as her character’s own post-work code for “It’s not going to happen tonight,” Wiig spends much of the movie as the source of her husband Joel’s (Jason Bateman) sexual frustration. It’s in her dealings with idiotic gigolo Brad (a scene-stealing Dustin Milligan) that Wiig’s character gets her own personality and several laughs, finally realizing just how stupid this guy is and how foolish she’s been to get wrapped up in the affair.

“Bridesmaids” (2011)

The leading role that showed Hollywood that Wiig should be getting leading roles, Annie could have felt like a generic romantic comedy character dealing with personal and professional failure. Thankfully Wiig’s performance, which obviously came from the eventually Oscar-nominated script she co-wrote with Annie Mumolo, goes far deeper than that, and not just because she and her off-screen friend Maya Rudolph so excellently and naturally capture the closeness and tension between their on-screen besties.

“The Skeleton Twins” (2014)

Back together in starring roles, Wiig and Hader’s performances are the best, impressively complex reason to see this just-OK and pretty formulaic drama about siblings dealing with depression, infidelity and a number of other common elements of movies like this. When they break into a joint lip sync of Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” you think to yourself, “If the entire movie was them doing this for 90 minutes, I’d be OK with that.”

“Welcome to Me” (2015)

This movie could have gone so wrong, with Wiig starring as an emotionally unstable woman who wins the lottery and decides to finance her own talk show, which she hosts and spends the entire time talking about herself. But the actress helps the film avoid the exploitation of someone with mental illness and become a study of releasing pain … in the most public way possible.

Bonus: “Knocked Up” (2007)

As a passive-aggressive E! executive, Wiig made you want to see more of her and less of Katherine Heigl. It wasn’t long before that’s exactly what we got at the movies. Hooray!

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