This year saw no shortage of major-name actors giving performances that rank among the best of their careers.
To cite just a few, Adrien Brody revisited territory akin to his Oscar-winning role in The Pianist, pouring ecstasy and anguish into a Holocaust survivor in The Brutalist; Nicole Kidman continued to push herself in audacious new directions with a frank exploration of unconventional female desire in Babygirl; Demi Moore’s first-hand knowledge of the expiration date for women on camera no doubt fed her character’s gnawing desperation in The Substance; and Daniel Craig shook off the last vestiges of James Bond, bringing louche seductiveness but also lacerating pain to William S. Burroughs’ alter ego in Queer.
However, plenty of under-the-radar actors shone in 2024’s movies, from “complete unknowns” through stalwart supporting-rank troopers to name talent perhaps previously underestimated.
Here are 15 favorite breakouts, with one extra thanks to a double entry.
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Michele Austin, Hard Truths
Image Credit: Courtesy of Simon Mein/Thin Man Films Ltd Much of the attention around Mike Leigh’s blistering character study has deservingly landed on Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s uncompromising turn as Pansy Deacon, a British Jamaican Londoner defined by her explosive vitriol. With consummate skill, the director and his Secrets & Lies star imperceptibly expand our view of Pansy’s furious demeanor to allow compassion for the pain at the root of her bitterness. A considerable part of that shift is due also to Austin’s big-hearted characterization as her sister Chantelle, a hairdresser and single mother as generous, caring and warm as Pansy is walled-off and forbidding. Where others in the family keep a wary distance, Chantelle refuses to be intimidated by her older sister’s volatility. Even when her patience is tested, she shows Pansy unconditional love, exposing the cracks in her hardened shell in subtle ways that transform her from a monster to a figure of enormous pathos. While Austin has had small roles in previous Leigh films, her exceptional work here becomes the affecting drama’s secret weapon.
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Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown
Image Credit: Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures Even with sizeable parts in Top Gun: Maverick and the well-reviewed 2021 indie The Cathedral behind her, Barbaro’s radiant performance as Joan Baez in James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic seemed to come out of nowhere. Holding the screen with effortless poise, she fully inhabits the role of the consecrated folk goddess who would soon grace the cover of Time magazine, riding high on success but too grounded to be dazzled by the trappings of fame. As magnetic as Timothée Chalamet is playing Dylan, Barbaro matches him both in their dramatic scenes together and with her gorgeous vocals in their exhilarating duets. While admiring his prodigious talent, Joan swiftly sizes up Bob as the kind of narcissist who is deadly relationship material. She has enough self-respect to step away, unlike his regular girlfriend played by Elle Fanning, who gets wounded and goes back for more.
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Yura Borisov, Anora
Image Credit: Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection Sean Baker’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner gets much of its buoyant screwball energy from Mikey Madison as a scrappy Brooklyn sex worker who impulsively accepts when the stoner son of a Russian oligarch proposes. She then refuses to roll over and play docile when his family sends in a goon squad to retrieve him and have the marriage annulled. The movie slowly uncovers the hurt beneath Anora’s resilient façade, accessing that poignancy via the stealth sensitivity of Borisov’s Igor, the muscle who displays unexpected empathy for her emotionally bruised state. Russian actor Borisov was superb in Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen’s Arctic road movie, Compartment No. 6, playing an obnoxious miner whose surly isolation gradually melts in the company of a fellow train passenger. He’s arguably even more moving in Anora as a man whose capacity for kindness perhaps takes even him by surprise.
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Raúl Briones, La Cocina
Image Credit: Juan Pablo Ramírez/Filmadora Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ feverish tragicomedy takes place in a hive of frenetic activity always on the verge of chaos — the lunchtime rush at a tourist-magnet Times Square restaurant. It’s a muscular ensemble piece rippling with anxiety and adrenaline as it surveys the hopes and dreams and crushing realities of the mostly undocumented immigrants working the production line under the thumb of an autocratic chef. The core of the drama and the source of much of its vitality is Briones’ Pedro, a cook who’s both a hopeless romantic and an antagonistic jerk. He’s distraught over the decision of his girlfriend, an American waitress played by Rooney Mara, to terminate her pregnancy; needled by the fear that the $800 missing from the previous evening’s take might be pinned on him; and impatient for the restaurant owner to deliver on his promise to get his immigration papers sorted. “The guy is a fucking time bomb,” says a colleague, as Pedro gets increasingly jumpy, building to a spectacular meltdown.
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Lily Collias, Good One
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sundance Institute Debuting writer-director India Donaldson’s micro-portrait of a transitional moment in a young woman’s late adolescence owes some of its transfixing power to the Catskills setting where the protagonist goes on a weekend camping trip with her dad and his similarly divorced best buddy. The limpid gaze the movie brings to nature in all its expansive beauty provides an effective canvas for the intimacy with which it observes Collias’ 17-year-old Sam. She’s torn between rolling her eyes at the fragile egos of her middle-aged companions — played by James Le Gros and Danny McCarthy — and serving as their designated cook and caregiver, a role that her body language and small changes in her expression suggest is an uneasy fit. When a line is crossed, we feel the indignation in Collias’ internalized performance, rupturing the group’s harmony, perhaps irrevocably. Collias’ ability to convey churning depths with economical means gives the narratively spare drama its emotional amplitude.
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Lily-Rose Depp, Nosferatu
Image Credit: Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features You could argue that Depp is already too well-known to qualify for a breakthrough roundup, but the jury was still out on whether she had serious acting chops, particularly after the collateral damage she sustained in the wreckage of Sam Levinson’s tawdry HBO series, The Idol. It seems safe to say few people saw her revelatory performance in Robert Eggers’ fresh take on the century-old vampire tale coming. In the terrifying prologue, Depp’s Ellen is introduced as an emotionally troubled teenager, her prayer for comfort unwittingly awakening Bill Skarsgard’s ancient bloodsucker, Count Orlok. As she grasps the mystical darkness inside her that summoned the vampire, Depp pinballs with hypnotic physicality from melancholia to fear, from convulsive delirium to limp helplessness, from possession to queasy desire. To use the count’s own words, Ellen is as much his “affliction” as his prey, and Depp nails the role’s many complex contradictions.
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Ryan Destiny, The Fire Inside
Image Credit: Sabrina Lantos/Amazon MGM Studios/Courtesy Everett Collection Cinematographer-turned-director Rachel Morrison and screenwriter Barry Jenkins rise above the conventions of the inspirational real-life sports drama in their retelling of the path to Olympic glory of boxer Claressa Shields from Flint, Michigan. The movie gets its charge from visceral fight scenes and its texture from fine-grained detailing of a disadvantaged environment in which the odds are stacked against Claressa, but where community still matters. Its emotional richness, however, comes from the blazing spirit of Destiny’s performance — tough and tenacious, without obscuring the scars of a challenging family life. It’s a testament to the young actor’s handle on her role that she more than measures up opposite the great Brian Tyree Henry as her volunteer trainer, Jason Crutchfield. Their bond is by turns tender and fractious, nurturing and defensive; even when their story hits familiar beats, it feels drawn from life, not from a formulaic playbook.
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Carlos Diehz, Conclave
Image Credit: Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection It takes real screen presence not to disappear in a stacked ensemble that includes Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini, not to mention seasoned actors like Lucian Msamati and Sergio Castellitto in lip-smacking roles. In Edward Berger’s expertly crafted thriller about behind-closed-doors Vatican intrigue during the election of a new pope, Diehz commands attention even in his stillness, communicating the character’s purity of heart and faith through his expressive eyes as much as his words. The Mexican newcomer, who came to acting after a three-decade career in architecture, imbues his outsider role, Cardinal Benítez, with serenity and moral conviction, making him stand out among the flock of senior clergy lobbying for power, at times unscrupulously, their strategic voting driven more by political gamesmanship than the good of the Church. And that’s even before the final act’s eyebrow-raising twist puts Benítez in a new light.
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Karla Sofía Gascón, Emilia Pérez
Image Credit: PAGE 114 – WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS – PATHÉ FILMS – FRANCE 2 CINÉMA. A Spanish actress previously better known for telenovelas than movies, Gascón is the pulsing life force at the center of Jacques Audiard’s polarizing musical about a Mexican cartel boss who seeks redemption and the love of her family after gender-reaffirming surgery. Arguably not since Daniela Vega in A Fantastic Woman has a trans actress gotten to carry a major film to the extent Gascón does as Emilia — albeit flanked by an outstanding Zoë Saldaña as the lawyer enlisted to facilitate her transformation. Gascón navigates the sense of liberation, joyous self-realization and discovery with incandescent authenticity in what becomes a purification rite of sorts. Just the way she savors the sound of her new name post-surgery is ineffably moving. Gascón brings soulfulness to Emilia’s regret over the sacrifice of her family, and to her reckless quest to reverse that situation, compromising her anonymity.
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Ethan Herisse & Brandon Wilson, Nickel Boys
Image Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Courtesy Everett Collection The lyrical aesthetic sensibility of director RaMell Ross and the vividly detailed imagery and searching close-ups of cinematographer Jomo Fray make this adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning Colson Whitehead novel a unique excavation of the Jim Crow South’s ugly history of racial cruelty. But the film’s penetrating gaze also owes much to Herisse and Wilson, playing promising student Elwood and slippery cynic Turner, whose alternating points of view become our eyes and ears. As strangers who form a close friendship while incarcerated in a fictional reform school in 1960s Florida — based on the notorious Dozier School for Boys — the gifted young actors’ understated intensity makes them a heartbreaking conduit for trauma, their pain subsiding only to make way for debilitating numbness.
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Kani Kusruti, All We Imagine as Light
Image Credit: Cannes Film Festival Payal Kapadia’s poetic narrative voice springs directly from her documentary background, giving her first fiction feature a striking verisimilitude in its portrait of three women unpicked from the busy fabric of contemporary Mumbai life. Colleagues at the same hospital, each of them experiences personal enlightenment in different ways when they leave the city for a seaside village and get to breathe again. The anchoring presence is Kusruti’s hard-working nurse Prabha, who chooses solitude over infidelity to a husband working in Germany, with whom communication has grown more infrequent. The actress, who also impressed this year as an overprotective mother in Girls Will Be Girls, gives Prabha aching emotional transparency even as she maintains her careful composure. We gradually arrive at a deeper understanding of all three women and the nourishment provided by their connection. But it’s Kusruti’s Prabha, by far the most reserved of them, who touches our hearts and lingers in our minds long after the end credits roll.
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Clarence Maclin, Sing Sing
Image Credit: A24/Courtesy Everett Collection The only familiar faces in the cast of Greg Kwedar’s experiential docu-fiction are Colman Domingo as an inmate and Paul Raci as the director of a Rehabilitation Through the Arts program for incarcerated men at the maximum-security correctional facility in upstate New York. Working alongside them is an ensemble plucked from RTA alumni, most notably former inmate Maclin, portraying Divine Eye, a version of himself during his 17-year sentence. A peak-form Domingo plays Divine G, the charismatic star playwright and performer of the group, who takes a chance on the aggressive, unpredictable Divine Eye, recruiting him for the program based on what he perceives as raw talent. Their bond oscillates between antagonism, rivalry and détente, gradually warming into friendship as they realize how much common ground they share. Maclin is an unselfconscious natural, unafraid to access his tough-guy past or the redemptive wisdom he acquired through his RTA involvement. He gives a thoroughly lived-in performance that earns our affections without ever courting them.
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Aaron Pierre, Rebel Ridge
Image Credit: Courtesy of Allyson Riggs/Netflix This is a slight cheat in that the classically trained English actor already had something of a breakthrough moment three years ago in Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad. But Jeremy Saulnier’s slow-burn crime thriller is his first solo gig leading a feature film, and with his imposing physical presence and piercing dark eyes, Pierre is never less than riveting. In a star-making performance, he plays former Marine Terry Richmond, whose experience with close-quarters combat technique and weaponry comes in handy when he falls afoul of the corrupt police department in a Louisiana backwater. Led by a villainous Don Johnson, those cops are indirectly responsible for the death of Terry’s cousin, setting up a powder-keg revenge scenario in the best pulpy B-movie tradition — elevated by Saulnier’s artistry and by the discipline, cool-headed intelligence and bone-crunching strength Pierre brings to its protagonist.
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Maisy Stella, My Old Ass
Image Credit: Marni Grossman/Prime Video Not every actor can bounce off the queen of sardonic deadpan, Aubrey Plaza, without coming off as the less interesting straight man. Stella, seen previously with her sister as a sibling vocal duo on the country music series Nashville, transitions to features with winning confidence in Megan Park’s disarmingly sweet coming-of-age tale, which ably balances comedy, romance and a dash of fantasy. She plays Elliott, a spirited 18-year-old eager to head off to college in the city, to flee her tiny lakeside hometown and her family’s cranberry farm. But a hallucinogenic mushroom trip ahead of her departure introduces Elliott to her future self, two decades older, played by Plaza, who counsels her to savor what’s left of her youth and spend time with the people she loves. The captivating Stella negotiates the movie’s many supple shifts with ease, keeping the sentimentality palatable in what ultimately becomes a wistful intergenerational contemplation of what we carry with us and what we leave behind as we take the leap into adult independence.
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Zoe Ziegler, Janet Planet
Image Credit: Courtesy of Telluride Film Festival In a too rare example of a lead role worthy of her talents, Julianne Nicholson is wonderful as an earthy single mother given to moments of melancholy and distraction in this miniaturist jewel, the first feature from playwright Annie Baker. But the crucial element that makes Nicholson’s Janet such a multidimensional character is her sometimes spiky relationship with her 11-year-old daughter Lacy. That perceptive, preternaturally wise kid is played by genuine discovery Ziegler. Lacy studies Janet and her interactions with various people over the course of one New England summer like a geek with a science project, her eye anything but uncritical. Ziegler offsets the character’s childlike curiosity with surprising emotional maturity. She’s blunt, self-dramatizing and low-key hilarious without ever trying too hard as Lacy quietly reassesses the woman who has been her entire world, her ultimate verdict open to interpretation.