When a comedian tries to make the leap to drama, we make a lot of assumptions about their motives, chief among them being that they are sick of playing clowns and desperate for the respectability that only serious-minded fare brings. That's what critics said about Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, and Jim Carrey, for example, during their mostly ill-fated attempts at drama. But there are also comic actors for whom drama is a natural extension of their art. Their comic instincts are clearly born of pain and anguish, and their serious work subsequently casts even their comedy in a new, more substantial light. Steve Martin may be one of those actors. Robin Williams, we now know, certainly was. But it is also time to add another name to the list of those who have succeeded at both comedy and drama: Kristen Wiig, who gives the best performance of her career in The Skeleton Twins, out this weekend.

The film sees Wiig and old SNL buddy Bill Hader playing estranged twins, Maggie and Milo, who reunite and attempt to fix their broken lives after they each attempt suicide. Hader is the film's lead, and he gets plenty of laughs as a struggling gay actor back in his conservative hometown, but Wiig has the more compelling arc. Her character is the twin who, by comparison, has her life put together. She has a job and a husband, and is trying to get pregnant. But we know from the opening scenes that she, too, suffers from severe depression, and we spend the rest of the film peering inside her head as she struggles to maintain her façade.

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The darkness of The Skeleton Twins is not an outlier; Wiig's last three starring roles have all come in dramas. In 2012's Girl Most Likely, she plays a once-promising playwright forced to move back in with her gambling-addicted mother after faking a suicide. The film isn't great, but Wiig showed that she can carry a movie without relying on laughs. This year's Hateship Loveship featured Wiig as a caretaker who is thrust into a new job after the woman she worked for since she was 15 years old dies.

There is a common thread that runs through these characters: Each is dealing with depression brought on by the loss of a parent at a young age, and they are struggling to succeed as an adult, both in their career and in their relationships. Suicide factors heavily into all of them. There is no correlation here to Wiig's personal life or her childhood that we know of, but we should not be surprised that she was drawn to these darker elements of the human experience, as they are present in her comedy.

From her early days on Saturday Night Live to the present, the persisting subject of her art has always been human loneliness. When director Liza Johnson cast her as the lead in, she cited Wiig's comedic work as proof that she could tackle the challenging role: "Underneath the awkwardness is a real core of soulful emotions that include shame and embarrassment."

You can see this in some of her most famous SNL characters, like the troubled schoolgirl Gilly or the compulsive one-upper Penelope. Both of them were anti-social, desperate for attention, and, like almost all Wiig characters, struggling with loneliness, albeit in an outlandish, comedic way.

Shame, embarrassment, and loneliness were also the key tenets of Bridesmaids, Wiig's 2011 breakout hit. She milked a lot of laughs out of the trials of Annie, a poor, unemployed baker, but underneath the slapstick humor was a very dark story of a woman hitting bottom. Over the course of the film, Annie loses her boyfriend, her job, her apartment, and, of course, her best friend. People remember the gross-out sequences the most, but the scene that has stayed with me the longest was a lyrical interlude in which Annie bakes a single, beautifully-rendered gourmet cupcake, and has no one with whom to share it.

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In each of these roles, Wiig gets to laugh and cry, bask in the light and plumb the depths of her darkness. In other words, she maintains a complex duality, and this has always been her talent. Consider her star appeal: She is undeniably attractive, but her specific allure is hard to pin down. Is she a tomboy, girl-next-door type, or more of a sexual being? She has played both types in her career, often in the same role (see Hateship Loveship). She eschews political statements in her work, yet Bridesmaids was seen by many as a feminist text, breaking ground in film for foul-mouthed women the way Joan Rivers once did as a stand-up.

These seemingly contradictory parts do not add up to anything you can grasp; they only adds to Wiig's ability to transfix an audience. "She has the kind of mystery you generally associate with an actress and not so much with a comedienne," said Sean Penn, her co-star in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and her upcoming roles reinforce the perception of Wiig as a serious and, yes, brave actor. She's become far more than just a comedian.

Welcome to Me, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, features Wiig as a woman suffering from bipolar disorder who wins the lottery and uses her newfound wealth to make a talk show about her life. One scene features a fully-nude Wiig walking across a casino floor. Also debuting at TIFF is Nasty Baby, a drama in which Wiig and Alia Shawkat play a gay couple trying to have a baby with the help of a male friend.

Lastly, Wiig and Annie Mumolo (who co-wrote Bridesmaids) have been hired to write another studio comedy, and this time Wiig will be directing. In the press release announcing the film, Tom Rothman, chairman of TriStar Productions, joked, "Kristen and Annie assured me that the film will be a searing and depressing drama, which is what the world needs right now."

Though depressing dramas may be the last thing the world needs right now, we know that however hilarious whatever Wiig and Mumolo come up with is, it will be based in something a little darker and a little more real. Sometimes, this darkness is exactly what a comedy needs to truly be funny.