Top 5 Up-and-Coming Actors (Which Includes Women Too, Dammit)
Every once in a while-not often, but occasionally-I’ll watch a movie and be struck dumb by a performance. Usually it’s by an actor on whom I’ve come to depend for consistently memorable performances, like Al Pacino or Nicole Kidman (let the flaming begin), but there are times that I’ll see a performance so bitch-slap amazing that I literally can’t believe my own eyes, and I won’t even recognize the actor. Or I’ll recognize him or her, but be flabbergasted that he or she is capable of delivering the goods, when all previous experience suggests a level of talent best suited to television commercials.
In that spirit, I present mustbebunnies88’s Top 5 Up-and-Coming Actors (Which Includes Women Too, Dammit), a list of the best barely-recognizable talent out there today. I started this list a while ago, though, and since then some of my choices have gotten marginally more famous, to the point that people who follow film might be familiar with them. But if the average moviegoer wouldn’t know their name, I let them stay on the list.
So here we go!
Note: For each of my Top 5 choices, I have elected to focus on the specific performance that cemented each actor on the list. This performance might not be the one I consider his or her best, but rather is the one that first left me awestruck.
Honorable Mentions:
Justin Long: (He’s consistently adorable, and displays a genuine ability for making third-rate dialogue bearable. He was a likeable, charismatic leading man in Accepted, and was great in supporting roles in The Break-Up and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. Plus, I like his Mac commercials.)
Isla Fisher: (Besides being 5’1” of pure, red-headed hotness, she’s a deeply talented comedienne. No offense to Rachel McAdams, but she just couldn’t hold a candle to Isla’s frantic, wildly hilarious turn in Wedding Crashers. In fact, no one could. She blew them all off the screen, and, along with Vince Vaughn, rescued the movie from being intolerably dull. I can’t wait for more from her.)
AND NOW...THE TOP FIVE!
5. Ryan Gosling: I have yet to be unimpressed with a performance of his. As deeply ashamed as it make me to admit this, I sobbed my way through The Notebook in large part because of his understated take on Noah, a man as overwhelmed by the depths of his love as he is powerless to stop loving. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really want Ali and Noah to end up together-I liked the other guy-but Gosling’s stone-jawed devotion won me over, in the end. And that scene in the hallway? Hot.
4. Amy Adams: Even if she hadn’t been perfectly cast as Jim’s short-lived, memorably air-headed girlfriend on NBC’s The Office, or so vibrantly funny in her too-short turn as Will Ferrell’s assistant-turned-girlfriend in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, she’d make this list on the strength of her Oscar-nominated (should’ve been Oscar-winning) performance as Ashley in the otherwise unremarkable Junebug. As an endlessly optimistic, oddly endearing pregnant motormouth, she transforms a coulda-been-annoying character into one of the most winning young women in recent film. It helps that she was handed some of the best screen monologues of the past ten years (see: her scene in the hospital bed). They just don’t write monologues like that for film anymore, mostly because few actors can handle them. She can.
3. Lynn Collins: I have seen her in exactly one film, 2003’s exceedingly well-made The Merchant of Venice. She flat-out stole the movie, snatching it away from the-not-exactly-lacking-in-the-acting-chops-department trio of Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, and Joseph Fiennes, giving a breathtaking, wrenching, seductive performance as Portia, one of Shakespeare’s greatest heroines. Her incredibly self-assured performance never wavers, even when she has to don remarkably unconvincing drag to save her husband’s male lover from execution-speaking of which, okay. I’m not exactly Ms. Subtext, but the level of homoeroticism in this film reached Brokeback-ian proportions, which definitely made Fiennes’s desire to marry Portia a bit more difficult to swallow. Or at least it did until she came onscreen (she is mentioned before she is met), flirting with her attendants and effortlessly wrapping him-and the audience-around her finger.
2. Joseph Gordon-Levitt: There was a definite battle for the number-one spot on this list, and I’m almost tempted to skip number two entirely and declare co-winners. But I kind of hate it when people do that, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll just say that few actors working today, young or old, male or female, exhibit the kind of range that Gordon-Levitt displays in every film (his work on Third Rock from the Sun in no way prepared me for what he is capable of). He brought just the right amount of cynicism and cool to the neo-noir Brick, played troubled and near-mute to fascinating, terrifying effect in Manic, and mastered a dead-on Idahoan accent for his small part as a bigoted Mormon missionary in Latter Days (and he was sweetly flustered in 10 Things I Hate About You, which law requires that I mention). But it’s his bruising portrayal of a soul-dead teenage hustler in Mysterious Skin that first caught my attention. Hunching his skinny, wife-beater-clad shoulders forward and letting his hair fall into his eyes, Gordon-Levitt perfectly captured the mix of careless enjoyment and dawning comprehension that Neil experiences as he attempts to move past his abusive childhood.
1. Ellen Page: Six months ago, my only knowledge of Ellen Page was as Kitty Pryde, anonymous back-up mutant #12 in X-Men: The Last Stand, included only to insert some “tension” into the uber-boring Rogue/Iceman relationship (slight tangent here: Anna Paquin has an Oscar, people. She has proved time and time again that she can act. Would it be so difficult to give her a little more to do in the sequels?). And then I saw Hard Candy. Oh, and then. I watched the whole thing with my jaw practically scraping the floor, in awe of how insanely, unfairly talented she is. Page plays Haley, an assertive, overly-verbose fourteen-year-old who stumbles into an Internet flirtation with a charming, handsome pedophile-and then makes the unexpected leap from victim to vigilante. She stalks through her scenes like the predator she turns out to be, threatening her would-be seducer with a crazed gleam in her eye and a scalpel in her hand. It’s hands-down the best performance of 2006.