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The Trip to Greece: Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan's top 10 best impressions as new series arrives

Including anthony hopkins, david bowie and a spot-on mick jagger, article bookmarked.

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After what feels like an endless wait, The Trip has returned with a new series that follows Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan on a culinary expedition around Greece.

While it’s entertaining to see the fictionalised versions of the two comedians wine and dine their way around exotic locations, it’s not precisely the sole reason why viewers tune in.

The most notable aspect of The Trip is the impressions the pair reel off over dinner. Some are incredibly rusty (their Al Pacino needs a lot of work), but others are spectacular.

This new series sees the pair tackle, among others, Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone and Henry VIII as a cockney.

Below is a list of the 10 most memorable impressions to date.

10 | Dustin Hoffman

Which series? The Trip

In at 10, Brydon’s Dustin Hoffman impression, which sees him recite the actor’s Oscar winners speech for Kramer vs Kramer in 1989, is an interesting one considering that it doesn’t seem that good until you shut your eyes. Give it a go.

9 | Ronnie Corbett

Which series? The Trip, The Trip to Greece

A brief one, but a gem nonetheless. Brydon tackles Ronnie Corbett and pulls it off with aplomb, mainly thanks to accurately capturing the late funnyman’s recognisable laugh. Corbett gets another go in the new series, too.

8 | Marlon Brando

Which series? The Trip to Italy

Even Marlon Brando would have struggled to impersonate his Godfather character Vito Corleone without the mouthpiece he wore during filming, but Brydon somehow manages it. Not that Coogan’s too impressed. “You should put rolled up bread in your cheeks to pad them out,” he says.

7 | Sean Connery

Coogan and Brydon both use the fact they regularly order drinks as a prime opportunity to showcase their Bond impressions. Sitting top of the heap is their Sean Connery , which essentially turns into the both of them repeating ”shhhaken, not shhhtired” over one another.

6 | John Hurt

Which series? The Trip to Spain

Only on The Trip could an excursion to see a dinosaur statue turn into an excuse to start shouting in the voice of John Hurt . Moments after Brydon has given it a go, Coogan swoops in and tries his own interpretation out. One of the rare impressions that doesn’t happen at a dinner table, so we get the addition of Coogan’s John Hurt stance.

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5 | Michael Parkinson

Brydon impersonates the famous interviewer in an extended scene that sees the pair discussing which comedian has set the “benchmark” for British comedy. Coogan himself struggles to suppress laughter when, after stating that he starred alongside Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder , Brydon as Parkinson replies: “You died in the first 10 minutes, Steve. I felt you die in the first five minutes, in all honesty.”

4 | Anthony Hopkins

Brydon’s Anthony Hopkins is an early favourite. As he reads a manuscript aloud on a car journey, Coogan says: “You were thinking of doing Anthony Hopkins, weren’t you?” inspiring Brydon to launch into a terrific impersonation of the Welsh actor.

3 | David Bowie

This impression sees Coogan traverse 40 years of Bowie in one sentence. After Brydon reveals that the musician followed him on Twitter before his death, Coogan – impersonating Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust days – replies: “Shall I follow Rob Brydon?” before jumping to an older version of the singer: “Or shall I follow Rob Brydon in my later years?”

The best UK TV shows of every year this century

2 | Mick Jagger

Coogan’s time to shine truly arrives with his impersonation of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger . The secret to his success lies in the contorting of his lips into a huge pout while moving his head about in a jittery fashion. A “peacock-style” double-clap tops it off perfectly.

1 | Michael Caine

Which series? The Trip, The Trip to Italy, The Trip to Spain

It’s perhaps no stretch to say that The Trip has acquired more viewers over the years thanks to Brydon and Coogan’s Caine-offs. This particular impression has become something of an old favourite, making an appearance in each series. The highpoint was the first time it occurred when both lock heads over how exactly to nail the actor’s voice – while actually doing it.

The Trip to Greece airs every Tuesday at 10pm on Sky One and is available to watch on NOW TV

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Lasting Impressions

By David Denby

It’s been said of great mimics that they capture not just the voice and the manner of their subjects but their very souls. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, master impersonators and stars of the new comedy “The Trip to Italy,” are after something less grand and, in many ways, funnier. The movie is a sequel to “The Trip” (2011)—both were directed by Michael Winterbottom—and it repeats the earlier film’s mixed tone of hilarity and melancholia, as well as its absurd premise: the two men (they play themselves) are on an all-expenses-paid trip for the Observer . Their tough assignment is to drive through beautiful country, eat lavishly, and stay in exquisite small hotels, all so that one or the other can write high-toned culinary drivel for the paper. (They don’t actually know anything about food.) “The Trip” was set in the bleakly magnificent scenery of the hills and moors of the North of England; this film is set mainly along the incomparable coast (Liguria, Amalfi) of Italy. As the men amble through paradise, savoring such dishes as polpo alla griglia and coniglio arrosto , they take turns topping each other with riotous impressions of movie stars. They aren’t interested in anyone’s soul; they see themselves simply as professionals in an exacting trade that requires getting Christian Bale’s guttural whisper and Roger Moore’s English-butter croon exactly right. They also try to one-up each other as men, vying for professional success and for the attention of the invariably lovely women they meet. Sharks have duller teeth than Coogan and Brydon. Both movies, in fact, are about the impossibility—and the necessity—of male friendship.

Each film began as a six-part series on the BBC, and what we see, presumably, are the highlights. Yet if I hadn’t known that the footage had been cut way down I wouldn’t have guessed it. Winterbottom laid out the gist of a given scene, and the men improvised the rest, often taking off on bizarrely intricate riffs. Driving, eating, checking into hotels, lying alone (and sometimes not alone) at night—the recurring scenes, like the refrain of a song, give the movie formal clarity and simplicity, while, within the scenes, the editors (Mags Arnold, Paul Monaghan, and Marc Richardson) smooth what must have been ragged exchanges into unbroken streams of conversation.

The pace almost equals that of Robin Williams doing standup, but Coogan and Brydon reprise their best sallies for rhythm and for emphasis, so you won’t miss anything that matters. Ogling the scenery in “The Trip to Italy,” you wonder if the men’s small car—a Mini Cooper—will drive off the edge of a cliff, or if, when they board a yacht in the Golfo dei Poeti, someone will fall overboard and drown. But the “plot” is no more than the men’s thorny emotional connection and their mutual fixation on death. The only conventional suspense is whether Brydon and Coogan will return to their families or remain among the young women of Sorrento and Positano, catching octopus and squid.

Brydon, who is largely unknown in this country, has a long pale face, a Bugs Bunny smile, and pitted skin like that of his fellow-Welshman Richard Burton. Brydon’s voice is like Burton’s, too—baritonal, musical, and expansive. When Brydon reads Shelley in his imitation-Burton voice, he sounds nearly as authoritative as the Master. (He also does a mean Ian McKellen.) Brydon’s voice can go up or down an octave, or shrink, through some glottal mystery, to the tiny sound of a man in a box, a favorite routine that he does on British TV. Perhaps the most extraordinary of his impressions is a long series in “The Trip” devoted to Michael Caine at different stages of his life, from a snarling young Cockney to the elderly, hyper-polite butler in the “Batman” movies. Even as Brydon delivers his rendition, however, Coogan disputes his technique. You have to talk through your nose, he says; you have to get the nasality right, and he honks through his Michael Caine. For both men, craft is a passion, and the voice is supreme. When Brydon does Hugh Grant, the meaning of the words gets lost in a thicket of Grantian hesitations, jokes, and daft circumlocutions, only to emerge victoriously in a proposal that few women could resist. An actor’s distinctive voice is not just an element of leading-man stardom (which the two know they will never achieve) but the main equipment of sexual prowess. Coogan and Brydon’s Hollywood envy keeps the comedy free of sycophancy and appropriately hostile. Imitating well is the best revenge.

Coogan is best known here for his work in the Stephen Frears movie “Philomena” (2013), in which he played the real-life journalist Martin Sixsmith, an argumentative skeptic who helps Judi Dench’s Philomena Lee, a forgiving Catholic Irish woman, search for her long-lost son. Working in a softened version of screwball comedy, Coogan and Dench bantered with spirit but without sentiment. Yet, even in that relatively gentle role, Coogan, frowning, his pursed lips bordering on a sneer, came off as an articulate grouch. In the “Trip” films, playing a version of himself, he’s intelligent and dyspeptic, a man too clever to live by illusions but too ambitious to give them up. He’s dissatisfied with everything—his career, his relationship with his children, his waning sexual attractiveness—and he takes it out on his friend. In return, Brydon, in “The Trip to Italy,” concocts no fewer than three fantasies of murdering him, including a precise reënactment of the famous retaliation scene from “The Godfather: Part II.” As a portrait of male friendship, the “Trip” films are a triumph of the lean British comic style over the maunder and the mush of American bromance—Jason Segel and Seth Rogen pinching each other’s blubber.

Both films pursue the high and the low: a complicated deep-running sadness courses through the cynical, sybaritic adventures. In “The Trip,” Coogan and Brydon visit the villages where Wordsworth and Coleridge lived; they invade the poets’ tiny rooms, and recite, under gray skies, stretches of their early work, most of it devoted to loss and grief. The readings are done straight, with love and skill. Yet we’re meant to notice the diminution: from nature as spiritual necessity to tourist site; from poetry to show business; from inspiration to career worries. Coogan and Brydon abhor self-aggrandizement and self-promoting bluster—they know that what they do isn’t poetry.

The implicit comparisons recur in Italy, where the men visit the towns in which the sexual outlaws Byron and Shelley lived, shortly before their deaths. The comics perform funerary obsequies for the poets and again recite in their own and others’ voices. “The Trip to Italy,” for all its japes, is haunted by mortality, as was its namesake, “Viaggio in Italia” (1954), the Rossellini masterpiece starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman as a warring couple dismally on tour. Like them, Coogan and Brydon visit the museum at Pompeii, with its plaster casts of the bodies of the dead. Rossellini showed us a couple who died locked in embrace when Vesuvius exploded, a harsh reflection on the modern couple’s marital anguish. Here, in a blasphemous reduction, Brydon summons his man-in-a-box voice to play a Pompeian lying in a glass case; the two carry on a discreet gay flirtation. It’s not that the end is nigh for these men, but death, for them and for Winterbottom, is always present in life. Over and over on the soundtrack, Winterbottom plays the beginning of “Im Abendrot,” the last of Richard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs,” composed in 1948, a year before he died, at the age of eighty-five. The use of classical music in movies normally makes me wince, but in this film the glorious Strauss farewell fits every time.

James Agee, writing in The Nation , in 1946, noted that Groucho Marx, working with “extremely sophisticated wit . . . has always been slowed and burdened by his audience, even on the stage. He needs an audience that could catch the weirdest curves he could throw, and he needs to have no anxiety or responsibility toward even a blunter minority, let alone majority.” That audience now exists; it has been created during the past forty years by British and American television, particularly by cable television. Whether such people go to the movies anymore is a vexed question. On the opening day of “The Trip to Italy,” I sat in a New York art house among a gathering of decidedly mature viewers, who were apparently expecting a beach-and-mountain travelogue. For a hundred and ten minutes, watching some of the funniest comedy in years, they maintained a puzzled silence. The British, in their curious game of cricket, don’t throw weird curves; they deliver fast bowls. The two Winterbottom-Coogan-Brydon movies deserve an American audience, ready for wit, that can play along. ♦

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Movie Reviews

Friends coogan and brydon take their dueling impressions on a 'trip to spain'.

Bob Mondello

Rob Brydon (left) and Steve Coogan improvise exaggerated versions of themselves in The Trip to Spain. Rory Mulvey/Courtesy of IFC Films hide caption

Rob Brydon (left) and Steve Coogan improvise exaggerated versions of themselves in The Trip to Spain.

When Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's dueling Michael Caine impressions went viral during the first season of their food-tasting TV series, The Trip , it was more or less inevitable that the show's 6.5 hours of eating scallops and celeb impersonations would be edited down into movie form . Ditto with the second season's trip to Italy , which had them eating pasta and doing dueling Al Pacinos and Robert De Niros.

With most movie sequels, I'm done after a second helping, but they're now serving up the third season, The Trip to Spain , and yeah, sure, I'll take thirds. As with the first two films, a phone call sets things in motion. Coogan calls Brydon with an invitation that arrives at an opportune moment: Brydon looks across the room at his wife and screaming baby, who is letting out a 10-second wail, and before you can say "Spanish omelet" they're off to the land of Don Quixote to tilt at wind turbines and chat over chorizo about whatever pops into their heads. (Remembering a party, say, where Mick Jagger did a Michael Caine impression of his own.)

Coogan And Brydon's New 'Trip' Is, Well, A Real Trip

Brydon swings easily from Jagger doing Caine badly to himself doing Caine splendidly, as Coogan chimes in with Jagger being Jagger — all of which leads them to wonder at the fact that Jagger has recently fathered a child at 72.

Age is much on their minds this trip: They've both just turned 50, which they're determined to see as the prime of life. (Brydon notes it's about the age Miguel de Cervantes was when he wrote Don Quixote .) But they worry (in the voice of John Hurt, mind you) that they'll soon feel as ancient as the dinosaur tracks they find on their travels.

The point of the trip, though, is Spanish cuisine, which we see sizzling in the kitchen and served with food-porn panache by folks whose fractured English provides the stars with food for improvisation.

Two Guys On A Road Trip, Racking Up Comic Mileage

As with the previous movies, director Michael Winterbottom has encouraged Coogan and Brydon (who are friends in real life) to improvise exaggerated versions of themselves — Brydon a goofy Sancho Panza and Coogan a snooty Don Quixote. Their travels take them through breathtaking Iberian deserts, gorgeous seacoast villages and the castle where Marlon Brando played Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, sending them on a riff in which it becomes clear that, come the next Spanish Inquisition, Coogan will be asking the questions.

Brydon needles and Coogan remains oblivious (and slightly melancholy) in The Trip to Spain , as audiences are treated to a week-long conversation in which no narrative needle is ever left unthreaded. Talk of tilting at windmills à la Don Quixote leads to singing a familiar song with lyrics about "the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind," which leads to the observation that the song's original singer, Noel Harrison, was the son of Rex Harrison, who sang — wait for it — " The Rain In Spain ." Circles within circles.

I would follow these guys on a trip to anywhere.

• Sky One / BBC Two / Sky Atlantic
• 2010 - 2020
• 24 episodes (4 series)

Improvised comedy with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon on a series of road trips. Also features Rebecca Johnson , Claire Keelan , Margo Stilley , Marta Barrio and Timothy Leach

This Is How Michael Caine Speaks

During a wine-fuelled first lunch on their trip, Steve and Rob try to outdo each other with their impressions of Sir Michael Caine, both spanning decades and emotional ranges.

View this clip on the BBC website

From The Trip, Episode 1 . Featuring: Rob Brydon (Rob) & Steve Coogan (Steve).

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Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon Mock THE DARK KNIGHT RISES in New Clip from THE TRIP TO ITALY

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2010's The Trip didn't do much for me, although I love the scene where Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon try to find out who can do the better Michael Caine impression.  The sequel, The Trip to Italy , premiered at Sundance this past week, and IFC Films have released a clip where Coogan and Brydon have resumed impersonating the venerable Mr. Caine.  They also use this as an opportunity to poke fun at The Dark Knight Rises and expand their repertoire to impressions of Christian Bale and Tom Hardy .  It's quite amusing.

Hit the jump to check out the clip.

Via IFC Films.

Also, here's the scene their mocking if you want to compare Michael Caine's performance to their impressions:

Here's the Sundance synopsis for The Trip to Italy :

Michael Winterbottom’s largely improvised 2010 film, The Trip, took comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon—or semifictionalized versions thereof—on a restaurant tour around northern England. In this witty and incisive follow-up, Winterbottom reunites the pair for a new culinary road trip, retracing the steps of the Romantic poets’ grand tour of Italy and indulging in some sparkling banter and impersonation-offs. Rewhetting our palates from the earlier film, the characters enjoy mouthwatering meals in gorgeous settings from Liguria to Capri while riffing on subjects as varied as Batman’s vocal register, the artistic merits of “Jagged Little Pill,” and, of course, the virtue of sequels.

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Watch: More Michael Caine Impressions In 2 Clips From ‘The Trip To Italy’ With Steve Coogan & Rob Brydon

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Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon ‘s “ The Trip ” was a hard thing to pin down: it was a BBC TV series that was recut into a movie, and a travel documentary that didn’t really document anything much, in which the two British comedians played some indeterminately exaggerated/scripted/improvised versions of themselves. But despite nobody quite knowing what it was, a lot of people liked its meandering, mild comedy style and the interactions of the two master comedians: hence the similarly imprecise sequel, “ The Trip To Italy ,” now playing on BBC and to be released by IFC Films (in a shorter movie format) in the U.S. sometime later in the year.

Ahead of that premiere, the BBC has released a couple more clips, and like one we saw a few weeks ago , one of the new scenes also plays on the most successful (or at least most viral) moment of the original trip—the Michael Caine impression, this time matched up with a Roger Moore one. It’s a good impression and everything, but hopefully there’s more to the film than that. The second clip does at least suggest as much, with a bit of musing about Byron’s time in Italy. It’s all very aimless, but then that’s the attraction. Watch below.

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Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s Dueling Michael Caine Impressions

Here’s a great clip from BBC Two’s The Trip , a series in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play heightened versions of themselves traveling around England and reviewing restaurants. In it, they fight over who has the better Michael Caine impression. They are both quite good!

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The Jokes and Michael Caine Impressions Are Still Fresh in ‘The Trip to Italy’

In 2010, director Michael Winterbottom took actors/comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon and filmed a highly improvised, lightly autobiographical TV series for the BBC called The Trip , about a road trip/restaurant tour through Northern England as the subject of a series of articles for The Observer . The six-episode series was edited down into a feature film, also called The Trip , and released in theaters in the United States.

As they say, one good trip deserves another. Winterbottom, Brydon, and Coogan repeated the formula, cutting down a six, 30-minute episode series into a 108-minute film to create The Trip to Italy . As the title suggests, the pair have been transported to Italy, ostensibly to do a series of restaurant reviews for The Observer while following the path of poets Byron and Shelley. As with the original, the reason for the trip provides the thinnest of premises for the film.

Instead of focusing on the subject of the articles — the food and the lives of the poets — The Trip to Italy is mostly about Coogan and Brydon’s conversations along the way. The two play exaggerated versions of themselves, relating to each other as somewhat friends, but mostly friendly co-workers in the same industry. The two actors do what comedians do when they get together: they one-up each other’s stories, trade impressions, become sore and competitive over each other’s successes, get on each other’s nerves, and, ultimately, make each other laugh.

There are wisps of other plot threads — about how they relate to their families, feel about aging, and traverse through their careers — but most of the movie passes without too much incident. And, ultimately, it’s a genial way to pass a couple of hours. In the film, Brydon complains that people find his stage persona “affable” — a hard reputation to live up to in person — but “affable” is the best way to describe the film. It doesn’t require too much thought; audiences just have to sit back and let the jokes wash over them. There’s a teeny bit of literary history, a slight bit of drama, a smattering of food porn, but mostly jokes.

The direction is similarly relaxed. Winterbottom has the confidence to sit back and just let Coogan and Brydon unspool their comedy in front of the camera. He intersperses their conversations with gorgeous scenes of Italian landscapes and images of the restaurants slicing prosciutto, preparing pasta, and pouring wine. His direction isn’t showy or antic, but rather quietly beautiful.

Of course, these are all to be expected from fans of The Trip . The film is always aware that it is a repeat performance. “I’m surprised The Observer wants you to do this again,” Coogan wryly says in the beginning of the movie. “It’s like trying to do a sequel, isn’t it? It’s never going to be as good as the first time.”

Michael Caine impressions , the most celebrated part of the first Trip (videos of Coogan and Brydon’s Caine impressions from the first film went viral on their own), make a return early in the film, as if to denote their obligatory status. The relief is that the Caine impressions, as required as they are, are still really, really funny. Coogan and Brydon figured out how to put a different twist on them and found a way to wring new, unexpected punchlines out of an expected setup.

The same can be said of the rest of the film. It’s obvious there’s going to be lots of impressions, low-key conversations, and jokes at the expense of Brydon and Coogan. Still, even though it lacks the novelty of the first film, it manages to be just as hilarious. Having not seen the full TV series, it’s unclear whether this is because all of the dull parts wound up on the cutting-room floor of if the whole series is consistently funny, but I’m inclined to believe the latter based on the strength of the two lead actors and they way they feed off of each other.

Not seeing the series also makes it hard to know what advantages the DVD of the film version of The Trip to Italy would have over a DVD of the series, apart from the huge caveat that the film version seems to be the only one currently available to U.S. audiences. The DVD comes with no features except close to a half-hour of deleted scenes (which, yes, includes some more Michael Caine). That means that there’s almost the entirety of the series included on the DVD, but not quite all of it, and it’s impossible to watch it all chronologically. Given the choice, it might be preferable just to watch it all in half-hour installments, but complaining about the format wouldn’t be, well, affable.

'The Trip To Greece' Review: Steve Coogan And Rob Brydon's 10-Year Food Odyssey Comes To A Bittersweet End

Few could have guessed that a simple BBC travelogue series that followed two British comedians riffing and doing Michael Caine impressions would take off, but the Trip movies have been a comforting part of our pop culture landscape for the past decade. Like a warm blanket. Or a nicely grilled scallop. For 10 years, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon have been traveling across Europe, feasting on local delicacies while exchanging hilarious banter and ponderous musings about life and aging. It's a formula that has worked for the past three movies, and which director Michael Winterbottom repeats again with a heavier dose of melancholy in The Trip to Greece .

The Trip to Greece comes three years after the last installment of the franchise, 2017's The Trip to Spain , and picks up with Coogan and Brydon after they have already begun their latest restaurant stint for the Observer, starting off in Turkey to recreate the journey that Odysseus took in Homer's epic poem. Already there is an air of a farewell tour to the film, which Coogan, Brydon, and Winterbottom confirmed will be the last one in the series. As Coogan and Brydon move through their greatest hits of impressions — their fan-favorite Michael Caine bit shows up for a flash after they seemingly retired the bit in The Trip to Spain — the two of them laugh easier and joke more comfortably. Coogan, though still egotistical and fame-hungry, has loosened up around Brydon, who he treats more like an irksome friend than a nuisance. And Brydon takes all of Coogan's prickly moments in stride, having spent the better part of 10 years being the butt of his jokes. The two seem more at ease with their lot in life, with both of them well on the other side of 50 and being satisfied with what they've accomplished — Brydon with his lovely family, and Coogan with his (as he often repeats it) seven BAFTAs.

"I do think as you get older it's inevitable that you repeat yourself," Brydon remarks in a fun meta nod to the overall series, which is by no means reinventing the wheel. The Trip to Greece is the definition of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and in uncertain times like these, a certainty like this is sorely needed. Cooger and Brydon break into their impressions without any precursor, running through their greatest hits of Roger Moore, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Marlon Brando, Mick Jagger, and more — with a few new Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ray Winstone, and Werner Herzog impressions joining the fray. We need no introduction for them to launch into a five-minute Bond bit, because we've seen it before and we never get tired of watching the two of them try to one-up each other.

But there is an undercurrent of melancholy to The Trip to Greece which feels far stronger than in their past outings. To quote another sunny, meandering movie where two people do little more than eat and talk in Greece, "This place is full of thousands of years of myth and tragedy, and I thought something tragic is going to happen." The comparison to the Before trilogy is apt — The Trip series has been Winterbottom, Coogan, and Brydon's own meditation on the passage of time, albeit one with a few more running gags and jokes. Coogan and Brydon use the series to show off their impressions, but also to deconstruct the perception of fame — Coogan, the more famous of the two, spends the films grasping for more renown while often getting the raw end of the deal when it comes to love and relationships. Brydon has his own marital ups and downs, but often ends the films a far sight happier than Coogan does.

Coogan's existential struggles this time around come in the form of his sick father (Richard Clews), which hangs like a dark cloud over most of the film. Steve's now 23-year-old son Joe (Timothy Leach) calls Coogan in the middle of his trip to inform him that his dad has been taken to the hospital, and Coogan starts to brood more than usual — his vivid re-enacted dreams, which are an entertaining staple of this series, taking the form of Greek tragedies and Ingmar Bergman films as he worries over his father's health. It's this added gloom to the film that breaks up some of the formula of The Trip to Greece — all the other Trip films have seen Coogan (and one time, Brydon) have one-night stands with several waitresses and hotel hostesses during their journeys, but he falls back into bed with their longtime photographer Yolanda (Marta Barrio) a tad more wistfully this time, their affair given an added sheen of romance as we see them kiss (for the first time onscreen!) under a sky full of fireworks.

Winterbottom approaches this film with an awareness that this is the end of the road for the bickering British comedians, delivering sweeping drone shots of the sunny Greek coasts, and drool-worthy scenes of the delectable seafood that Brydon and Coogan dig into. It's operatic and wistful, but with that tongue-in-cheek humor you know and love — one shot of Brydon and Coogan racing through the ocean is a majestic birds-eye view of the two of them looking like they're floundering in the water. Like the Greek heroes that the two of them are emulating, The Trip to Greece is a bittersweet end to Brydon and Coogan's odyssey.

/Film Rating: 8.5 out of 10

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All of the The Trip Trilogy’s Celebrity Impressions, Ranked

This article originally appeared in Vulture .

“I think anyone over 40 who amuses themselves by doing impressions has to take a long, hard look in the mirror.” —Steve Coogan,  The Trip

If Michael Winterbottom’s  The Trip  film series is a story about a pair of men constantly flailing to prove their masculinity to one another and themselves, then the celebrity impression is their ultimate currency of manhood. As U.K. funnymen Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan eat their way through a rotation of heart-stoppingly gorgeous countrysides—first the  north of England ,  then Italy,  and in the latest installment out Friday, the Spanish coast—they’re locked in a permanent state of one-upsmanship, and imitation is the sincerest form of dominance. They attempt to riff one another into submission, both henpecking every minute detail of the other’s dead-on Bond routine or Mick Jagger bit. While their female companions roll their eyes, the pair of fatuous boobs duel in the comedic equivalent of a dick-measuring competition.

On the occasion of  The Trip to Spain ’s completion of this stellar trilogy, Vulture has undertaken the vital and solemn work of compiling and ranking the many impressions contained within the series. From  Godfather  alumni to esteemed British thespians, here’s the full repertoire of the Brydon-Coogan brain trust:

18. Michael Parkinson

Brydon only does this esteemed broadcast journalist and talk-show host for a brief moment before abandoning the bit, and for good reason. Forget that Parkinson never achieved the household-name status among Americans that he enjoys with his British countrymen. (We’ve got no real American equivalent, which says something troubling about the state of a national late-night culture that gave us Carpool Karaoke.) But the cornerstone of these bits is the ability to instantly recognize what a personality sounds like, and if a subject doesn’t have such a memorable tone of voice, you’re sunk from the start.

17. Gore Vidal

William F. Buckley may be the more fun character to lampoon (see Michael Sheen’s chain-smoking, sweaty, perpetually horny stand-in in  Seven Days in Hell ) but Vidal, his rival in public ideology, has a refined, mannered way about him that’s all too easily mocked. Putting on an intellectual air is as easy as turning your nose slightly upward, but as ever, Brydon cuts to the man behind the tics. Truly mastering the American accent is an accomplishment that requires Zen-like focus, reliant more on absence and not doing than presence and doing. Flipping into it with no trouble speaks to Brydon’s mastery of his craft.

16. Humphrey Bogart

It’s all but impossible to say the words “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship” and  not  slip into Bogie’s old-timey Nu-Yawk intonation. Brydon only does one blessed line from the screen idol of yore, and yet that’s all that’s needed, so powerful is Bogart’s cultural shorthand.

15. Anthony Hopkins

A Hannibal Lecter bit is not an Anthony Hopkins bit. There is no mention of fava beans at this dinner table, no exaggerated slurping noises, and no “Hello, Clarice.” In his native U.K., Hopkins isn’t as defined by his  Silence of the Lambs  role, and Brydon conveys as much with his gentle, firm imitation. Hopkins has a tinny, commanding voice; he’s his truest self in  The Lion in Winter , evincing regal composure until his temper gets the better of him. Brydon goes into Hopkins mode while reading a restaurant review, elevating the adjective-heavy copy to the register of a soliloquy to the heavens.

14. John Hurt

The most pleasing impressions are the ones you didn’t even think could be done; a good Thomas Haden Church will always outclass another tired William Shatner. Cult-cinema fixture John Hurt wouldn’t seem like an easy target, but Brydon proves otherwise with his arch, aerated sighs. It’s a minor entry to this sprawling canon, yes, though it’s valuable as proof of Brydon’s skill for finding new comic ground to till.

13. Richard Burton

The heir apparent to Laurence Olivier, a profligate boozer with a taste for the high life, Richard Burton was a wastrel and a great man in one. The committed compartmentalizer Brydon uses Burton as a theatrical mask, slipping into the booming, commanding voice when he has to lend some heft to the words of Samuel Coleridge. Not since  Xanadu  (the disco musical) has the word “Xanadu” (the mythic stronghold of Kubla Khan) been so heavily freighted with drama.

12. Robert De Niro

As the  unfunnier masses of Twitter users  have so helpfully illustrated, a baseline Robert De Niro amounts to little more than squinting and mashing your mouth into an “eh, not bad” half-frown. Coogan and Brydon go several miles further, not just by tapping into the sinus-y menace in the actor’s voice, but by remaining faithful to his streams of creative obscenity. (Coogan threatens to rip off a certain body part and perform a certain bodily process down the resultant hole.) And god bless their souls, neither man even thinks about uttering the words “You talkin’ to me?”

11. Ian McKellen

Brydon gives his take on the treasure of screen and stage while reciting a Wordsworth poem at an aged cemetery in Bolton. Coogan roasts him for his inability to deliver a serious poem using his own voice, and while his charges of lacking range may stick, Brydon’s retort that he wanted to choose a persona that could bring gravitas to the material proves valid as well. McKellen’s got a thunderous, room-rilling voice, the sort that can make a guy who wears a bucket on his head to augment his magical magnet superpowers sound like a Shakespearean figure of tragedy.

10. Woody Allen

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all Jewish men over the age of 16 have a killer Woody Allen impression in their back pocket at all times. But Coogan and Brydon prove that goys can hang with the best of them, expertly capturing the Woodster’s congested New York nebbish-ese. The keys to the perfect Woody Allen impression: a touch of well-placed stammering, the air of neurotic hopelessness, the glottal strangulation that only a boyhood spent in synagogue can provide. Brydon and Coogan manage a mock Woody that would fit in at any college-improv-team house party, that most common habitat of the amateur Woody Allen impression.

9. Roger Moore

The brilliance of the Roger Moore impression is not in its accuracy, but its commitment. Both men hit the rich, full baritone of the former 007 perfectly, but insist on driving the joke through to the point of exhaustion, and then pushing it a little further, and then defibrillating it back to life and killing it again. Best realized in  The Trip to Spain , Moore dovetails with jokes about the Moors, and the adage that “less is more” until the groans from the ladies present turn into them completely checking out of the situation. In this instance, more Moore is more.

8. Dustin Hoffman

The first Dustin Hoffman impression is triggered as the result of a mix-up between the wish to work with “auteur” directors and “autistic” directors, prompting Brydon to do a lethal Rain Man. There’s a noticeable difference between the affected in-character Hoffman from that scene and the straight-up Hoffman that Brydon does a few scenes later; both men share the tight, pursed mouth and airy, nasal delivery, but the cadence of Rain Man–Hoffman’s speech has a tripping, uneven quality, as in the film. It’s a small detail, but one that speaks to the studied attention of the actor’s schtick all the same.

7. Mick Jagger

The particulars of the Mick Jagger impression are goofy enough to have sustained an  entire  SNL  sketch : You sort of make a duck face but open your mouth, place your wrists akimbo on your hips, and preen around with a peacockish swagger. Finger-wagging is encouraged. As Coogan generously shows, the double-clap doesn’t hurt, either. The men pop into the Rolling Stones front man’s flamboyant twang while playacting the Bard, filtering the musty dialogue through Jagger’s randy, rock-and-roll strut. The juxtaposition really brings out the baser qualities of Shakespeare’s writing—Jagger would’ve been a groundling.

6. Marlon Brando

Everyone knows that the success of a Marlon Brando routine depends entirely on one’s ability to make their mouth sound full, but full of something lumpy, like porridge. (Brando reputedly stuffed his cheeks with cotton balls to get Don Corleone’s signature mumble in  The Godfather .) Brydon can reproduce the desired sound effect all on his own, but Coogan decides to go the direct route and jam wads of bread right in his piehole. Little bits of starchy shrapnel fly out of his mouth like buckshot, but he gets the job done and then some.

5. Sean Connery

Of the many incarnations of James Bond that Coogan and Brydon affectionately parody, none matches the roguish charm of Scotland’s national treasure. The brogue is as significant a component of Connery’s icon status as the tuxedo or smirk—curl the tongue back, flatten all the “s” sounds into a masculine shushing, arch the eyebrow for good measure. More than that, the elevated stature of Connery captures a certain nobility that Brydon and Coogan like to imagine in their work. They consistently gravitate toward the board-treaders, actors with a theatrical, dignified air. Connery shows just how seriously they take the work of being silly.

4. Hugh Grant

Brydon’s channeling of Britain’s most rakishly handsome funnyman stands out by virtue of its intent rather than the specifics of the performance. Brydon doesn’t do Grant while shooting the bull with Coogan, but rather while he’s on the phone with his patient, dutiful wife who’s back at home with the kids. The  Love Actually  star is his spouse’s favorite film idol, and so Brydon will do a little boyish “oh, just noticed you there” stutter to make her giggle. It’s a disarmingly sweet moment in a franchise that speaks belittling sarcasm like a native tongue, and a succinct way to communicate how the pair might have fallen in love in the first place.

3. Al Pacino

There are two Al Pacinos: the actor who gave performances of fearsome, reined-in power during the ’70s, and the over-the-top madman behind his cokey, go-for-broke stretch of ’90s roles. (See “ SHE GOTTA GREAT ASS ” in your index of Great Actorly Freakouts.) Unsurprisingly, Brydon and Coogan favor that second one, with his bugged-out eyes and jagged rhythms of speech. The Al Pacino impression is the thinking man’s Nic Cage impression, a measured approximation of unmeasured craziness, an attempt to make sense of  hoo-AH . Of course it’s a natural part of a comedy bit—Pacino was always angling for laughs, in on the joke every step of the way.

2. David Bowie

Coogan and Brydon trade Bowies over a tasting menu in Spain, just one short year after the musical trailblazer returned to the cosmos from whence he came. Their absurd imagining of Bowie’s decision to follow Brydon on Twitter shortly before his death leads to the single greatest laugh of the film, as Coogan flips from a high, reedy voice for “Shall I follow Rob Brydon?” to a weathered, wearier tone for “Or shall I follow Rob Brydon in my later years?” In a film obsessed with aging, death, and the legacy we leave behind, however, the impression takes on an unexpected tinge of sadness. At the end of his road, what does a man have? A little blue check mark?

1. Michael Caine

If Coogan and Brydon are the Da Vinci of pretending to be famous people, then this is their Sistine Chapel. They bust out the Michael Caine at least once in each movie, forever refining the tiniest flourishes of the Cockney dialect to convey the actor’s working-class, street-bred background. The two men aren’t satisfied with merely aping Caine’s sound, either. They’ve got to note the evolution of his voice down an octave over the years, trace it back to a history of cigars and brandy, make the crucial distinction between Caine at rest and Caine in emotional mode. It’s a surprisingly thought-through bit, opened by Brydon taking umbrage at Coogan’s suggestion that a Caine impression is as simple as throwing on an East London steel-and-gravel-style of speech. Some may consider it to be a low form of humor, but a professional-level impersonation depends on attention to detail, specificity, and a physical elasticity that would make Jim Carrey jealous. Maybe it’s a dumb one, but hey, it’s an art form all the same.

See also:  Rob Brydon on The Trip and Doing the Perfect Michael Caine Impression

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Is This the Best (or Worst?) Time to Release a Travel and Food Film? Rob Brydon on the End of The Trip

By Jessie Heyman

When I saw The Trip 10 years ago, I felt it had been cooked up in a lab just for me. A meandering, melancholic gastro-tour in which two middle-aged Brits play a devastating game of one-upmanship while eating perfectly plated food? Yes, please. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s bits—a comic reimagining of a costume-drama soliloquy , spot-on impressions of Sean Connery and Michael Caine —quickly entered my vernacular and have never quite left me. (To this day, my family and I still occasionally declare: “Gentlemen to bed!”)

I was hardly alone in my affection for The Trip. The Michael Caine impression went viral, and the decade that followed brought our English odd couple on three additional Michael Winterbottom–directed holidays: Italy, Spain, and now, in its final act, Greece.

Like the three iterations that came before it, The Trip to Greece is chock-full of literary allusions. In this installment, our heroes (sweetened by age but saltier in appearance) are following the rather-on-the-nose path of Odysseus, beginning in Tevfikiye, Turkey (once Troy) and ending in Ithaca. The opening scene is a familiar one: Rob and Steve in a dreamy garden, trading barbs, eating a meal.

Watching this play out—nearly three months into quarantine—stirred up a foreign, almost painful feeling in me. What I wouldn’t give to be able to travel, to go to a restaurant, to joke face-to-face with a friend . “It’s given it almost like a science-fiction feel when we look at it now,” Brydon says to me via phone from his home in Twickenham, a town about 10 miles west of London, “these people who are allowed to travel freely.”

I ask Brydon, who has been gardening and self-isolating along with the rest of us, how it feels to promote a far-flung gourmand film while in lockdown. True to his character, he has a sunny outlook on the whole thing: “I hope it makes it more appealing,” he said. “It really is a chance to travel from your armchair.” Below, Brydon talks about a decade-worth of eating, traveling, and how it feels to say goodbye to The Trip .

How much of the food are you actually eating when filming?

We eat a fair bit. We eat a course three times. So we get served three starters, and each time Michael [Winterbottom] will reset the camera. And then we’ll get three mains and then three puddings. Now, on the first Trip , I put on eight pounds because I was just wolfing it down. I cut back on the future Trips , although, I still think I eat more than Steve [Coogan]. He pushes his food around his plate a bit more. And I have been accused of speaking with my mouth full because I can’t get a word in edgewise. But also, there’s a great realism that actually comes with eating the food.

Eating each course three times must make the meals more memorable.

Actually, I don’t remember the meals as well as you might think. I’m always thinking, Well, what am I going to say next? It’s during the meals that we often do a lot of the improvised stuff and try to be funny. So if you held a gun to my head, I could remember them, I’m sure. But people are often surprised that they don’t loom as large in my memory as they do to the viewer.

How much of your banter is actually improvised?

Michael is the author of the films. He comes to us with the country, the route, the restaurants, the literary allusions we’re making, the plot, what’s going to happen in our families—that’s all him. So I always say, he draws it and we color it in. So all the riffs, all the funny bits (dare I say) are Steve and myself making those up.

I read that Michael edited out a fair bit of Steve’s laughter in the previous films. With this one, he was more generous, which felt like a nice win for fictional Rob.

I think that we both personally—in reality, and in the film versions of ourselves—have relaxed over the years. Certainly, he and I get on better now. There’s more warmth between us now, more than there was before; we know each other a little more. And the fictional us know each other better as well. I think it’s also a combination of age—just getting older, enjoying being alive, wondering how much longer you have left. I mean, I’m in my mid-50s, so hopefully a lot of time, but you don’t know. I think you get to this age and you start to smell the roses a bit more.

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By Daniel Rodgers

Fictional Rob always seems to have a happy ending—certainly happier than Steve’s endings, at least.

It’s always been the thing that he’s more troubled, deep, grappling-with-things character. And that builds into the comedy where he becomes pompous and full of himself. The joke is that I live much more lightly. And there’s a kernel of truth in that, but it’s exaggerated for comic effect.

What was your favorite memory of this Trip ?

I tried to turn Steve into a Bruce Springsteen fan. So now whenever I hear “Western Stars,” it reminds me of being in this Range Rover covering hundreds of miles and me choosing the tracks for him.

Bruce didn’t make it into the film cut, though. You were mostly riffing on the title song from the musical Grease .

Right, because that was in reality . See, that’s a very interesting observation. To me, there’s obviously a clear divide. We wouldn’t be singing [the Grease theme] in reality.

Do you ever revisit the older installments?

No. If someone puts up a clip on Twitter or social media, I would maybe watch it, but I wouldn’t seek it out … I’ve had enough of me. I’m over me. I’m happy to watch, but there are other things I’d rather spend my time doing.

Has the decade-long experience of filming this series informed your sense of travel or dining out?

It’s made me a bit more adventurous, I suppose. It’s made me realize that there are lots of places I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of. I mean, it’s been a privilege to have beautifully curated holidays in these incredible countries. It really has.

How does it feel to say goodbye to The Trip ?

When I stop and think about it, it’s a bit sad. But my primary feeling is wanting to go out on a high. That will always be more important than any sentimental thing. I’m in touch with Michael a little bit, and with Steve, so we’ll keep that contact going.

Are you talking to Steve more or less now that we’re all self-isolating?

We’ve been in contact recently because of the film—I’ve shared quite a few Zooms with him. Our friendship is a bit more fraternal. I feel tremendously close to him; I have huge affection for him, but I don’t see him as much as I see a lot of other friends. He travels a lot; he doesn’t live near me. It tends to be more of a text-and-email kind of relationship. And then if we’re in the same place, we may meet up and have a meal.

The Trip to Greece is available to stream on demand now. This interview has been edited and condensed.