The 10 Best Actors of 2022
Welcome to our portfolio of paradoxes.
The first is that artists emblematic of great acting in moving images have been captured in still photographs. Another involves the state of the art itself. We chose 10 performances and could easily have doubled that tally, yet all of that talent finds itself in an iffy place. There are no guarantees for a screen actor anymore. There are no guarantees for a screen actor’s audience. We’re not even sure what we mean by “screen.” Read More
We walked into “The Woman King” intrigued (what, exactly, would a machete-and-sandal melodrama starring Viola Davis look like?) and left astonished. A great performance can amount to something in addition to craft — personality, zeal, observation, lunacy, exactitude, risk, freedom. And that movie had all of those right there in almost every performance. Davis, for instance, did her usual bruising work — an actor at peak intensity. But not only did the film showcase and redouble the might of an established star; it also made one out of Thuso Mbedu, who plays Davis’s — well, just treat yourself.
Here is someone whom we moviegoers deserve to get to know for years to come. But in what kinds of movies? As what sorts of people? Mbedu can act. But there just isn’t the variety of movies that could sustain all the acting she and many of the performers in the portfolio that follows could do — names you may not know, like Freddie Gibbs and Frankie Corio and, loosely, Vicky Krieps — but who once upon a time would have had a few chances to show what else they’re made of.
Those chances feel imperiled. And not for the old reasons (for being a woman, for not being white) — although there’s still some of that. The peril is industrial shortsightedness. There’s diminished interest in the human scale of storytelling, particularly in American movies, which increasingly feel the need to go big or risk the audience’s staying home. Perhaps that’s why we’ve turned, along with many an actor, to television, where the ground feels more fertile. Maybe to the point of feeling overgrown.
And that may be yet another paradox: a state of wild abundance that can seem a lot like scarcity. Talk of the “golden age” of television has receded in the face of the streaming gold rush. There are so many characters and narratives to keep track of. In an economy of scale, the aesthetics of scale can get out of whack. Stories that might have filled out a feature are stretched into six episodes. Eight-episode limited series flop into multiseason epics.
Yet, somehow, acting thrives in this environment. Mediocre shows and films are often made watchable by the gift and grit of performers (George Clooney and Julia Roberts in “Ticket to Paradise”; Adrien Brody and Rob Morgan in “Winning Time”). There is enough outstanding work on television alone to fill a portfolio twice or three times the size of this one. To that end, we enfolded limited series into the survey and collided with Jon Bernthal, who, on “We Own This City,” managed to turn crooked-cop work into a feat of appalling macho cheer; and were blown away by Toni Collette on “The Staircase,” for which, despite centuries of actors’ simulating death, she invented at least four new and distressing ways to perform dying.
But there is still, in the midst of all of that, the special lure and allure of the movies, which haven’t actually gone anywhere. Yes, you can stream “The Woman King” at home, but you would miss the bubbling joy of the families with kids — daughters and sons alike — when Davis and Mbedu get in each other’s faces and then join forces to purge their land of slavers.
Or you would miss the sound of a stranger in the next seat sobbing into his mask during the final shot of “Aftersun,” Charlotte Wells’s memory film about a father and his daughter on holiday in Turkey. All you’re looking at is Corio, playing an 11-year-old Scottish sprite named Sophie, mugging for the camera that her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), is holding as she prepares to board a flight home from their vacation. It’s a jumpy, grainy amateur image (the film takes place in a not-so-distant pre-smartphone past), but it’s also cinema in the most exalted sense.
Obviously, we hunger for what an actor can do for a movie: for the gruff poetry of Brendan Gleeson in “The Banshees of Inisherin”; for the salty sibling rivalry of Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya in “Nope”; for the pizazz and poignancy of Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans.” The year’s biggest hit stars Tom Cruise, and its staggering popularity is emphatic proof of what his stardom continues to mean to us. Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, playing a problematic maestro in “Tár,” matched and perhaps even exceeded the character’s mastery. Forget about the multiplex: That’s a performance fit for a concert hall.
So now that we’ve poured one out for movie-industry scarcity and rebattened the hatches for gushingly abundant TV, what is our true task here? It can’t be lamentation. We’re worried — it’s a critic’s job to be worried — but not yet woebegone. We want to applaud, marvel at and salute the achievement of screen acting, the increasing miracle of it in challenging and confusing circumstances. Because to watch the 10 artists here is to sense that acting remains in fine shape; to watch them is both life-giving and life-affirming. In one montage in “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” time warps everything around Michelle Yeoh except the astonishment on her face. Her surprise — which inspires our own — is proof of the beautiful mystery of the art form, and a reason to reconsider a longtime star’s endurance. How — how — did she pull that off?
This issue of the magazine is testament to our inability to answer that question. Every great performance is a unique amalgam of training, talent, collaboration and luck. In the end, we don’t know how they do it. What we do know is that we can’t stop watching.
Yeoh
“Everything Everywhere All At Once”
This movie: It is so bright and scrappy and weightlessly up in the air that confetti could have made it. But it’s got deep thoughts. About, say, what this country does and doesn’t do to and for immigrants (Chinese, in this case), and their children, and their children’s children, cosmically. Its biggest idea, though, is also its best: Michelle Yeoh. Evelyn, the overdrawn laundromat owner she’s playing, winds up doing battle — with feelings and martial arts — against a ruthless multiverse. I won’t belabor that conceit, except to say that it requires a performer who can take angst to the max, and that Yeoh might even exceed the film’s own excesses. She becomes a cosmos of her own. Read More
Her decades of stardom have often been about motion: the cursive her limbs make in midair, the effect of her feet and hands against oncoming bodies, the way any prop can become an instrument of her skywriting, floor-sweeping, eye-gouging modern dance. That’s true here too. The difference, though, is that Evelyn’s bafflement at all the infinite chaos makes uproarious demands of Yeoh’s face. Fatigue, exasperation, alarm, amusement, rue, delight, panic, joy, grief, seduction: There they all are, more than once, in a single sequence.
The filmmakers use montages to express either the collapse or expansion of time. But Yeoh’s big-eyed, big-mouthed visage, in the middle of the screen, is a clock, registering a stable emotional arc as the landscape surrounding her shifts by the nanosecond. Here we have a metaphor: The image of a major star’s endurance and an actor’s discovery that she’s still truly, thoroughly, movingly, peerlessly herself. — W.M. Read a review
Kaluuya
“Nope”
What type of performer is Daniel Kaluuya? “Take him home to meet your mama?” “Follow him unto the breach?” “Brace yourself for impact?” “Drinks on me?” Is he mercurial? That word suggests variety, and from role to role, he’s got that: never the same thing twice. But he’s too hard for what else “mercurial” connotes: lightness. Solidity is his draw. It has been ages since a new performer — a star — came along who could make opacity rhyme with elasticity. Read More
Let’s thank Jordan Peele. Five years ago, he introduced us to Kaluuya’s heft. The camera in his movies understands what a tidal event Kaluuya’s face can be, luring us to him, flooding us with wonder. “Nope” is their second movie together, and this time they go for archetypal force. Kaluuya’s character lives on a ranch and trains horses for Hollywood productions, but come on: The dude’s a cowboy. Solemn, damn near silent, obscured by either the brim of a baseball cap or a U.F.O. that, from some angles, evokes a 100,000-gallon hat. There’s some comedy to him. In a packed theater, his casually panicked delivery of the movie’s title brought the house down. But he adjusts the settings so that even levity has gravity. His scene partner is usually Keke Palmer, playing his kid sister as everything he’s not: loud, zany, surprising ... mercurial. Kaluuya’s embodiment of rumination and seriousness corresponds with Palmer’s liberation from it.
I suppose this is dutiful, dignified, older-sibling stuff. But Kaluuya knows he is playing someone thinking about legacies too — of the Black nuclear family, of his Black entertainment forebears. The movie’s final, towering shot of him, atop a horse, reveals the extent of his craft. All along, this Englishman has been molding that signature stoicism into something classically American, something unmovable, mighty, historical. He’s made himself a monument. — W.M. Read a review
Mbedu
“The Woman King”
All I knew about this movie, before I got there, was that Viola Davis was in it, that it was set in Africa during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and that Davis was playing a woman who was somehow also a king. I was less prepared for the discovery that she wasn’t the only actor with the gusto to singe my eyebrows. Thuso Mbedu plays Nawi, the runt in the all-female army of Dahomey warriors Davis commands, a cub determined to prove her mettle among the lions. She can’t simply dominate the training exercises; she’s got to suffer with valor and spunk. The movie’s comedy — some of it, anyway — comes from watching Davis subdue her awe at Nawi’s relentlessness. It must have been some of the hardest acting this great actor has had to do, because Mbedu is awesome. The part needs stamina: There’s lots of running, jumping, ducking, impaling. But Mbedu ensures that every thwack, knock and stabbing packs an emotional wallop. She doesn’t appear to be acting the battles. She’s performing the quest Nawi has embarked on — for both belonging and independence, guidance and trust. Read More
This wasn’t the first time I’d seen Mbedu. She played an enslaved person on the run in “The Underground Railroad,” Barry Jenkins’s neglected 10-part masterpiece from last year, and I didn’t see a more imaginatively grueling feat of acting. “The Woman King” is a spa day by comparison. Mbedu gets to be teary, tough, terse and sometimes, in her steeliness, a riot. (There’s a climactic moment when she has to do battle in some frilly colonial pantaloons, and she manages to make her face as hard as the fabric is delicate.) What an audience responds to is her urgency, her volcanic desire to matter, to shine. Rarely do we moviegoers get to witness someone we barely knew just minutes ago announce themselves as someone we’re desperate to see more of, but here we are: More, please. — W.M. Read a review
Williams
“The Fabelmans”
Light is a Steven Spielberg language, so it makes sense that a period piece about his coming of age is an emporium of incandescence: headlamps, projector bulbs, campfires, candles and, one Hanukkah, a plea for Christmas lights. It makes sense, too, that Mitzi Fabelman — a version of Spielberg’s mother — has married a guy who works for G.E. The actor playing her needs to summon acute luminescence. It is a showy part: Mitzi has four kids and a husband she might adore less than she loves his best friend. She’s theatrical, depressed, radiant, a grande dame and a little girl. She drinks, dances and plays a heavenly piano. The character means everything to Spielberg: Aspects of Mitzi have been played by everyone from Melinda Dillon and Dee Wallace to Whoopi Goldberg and Julia Roberts; she’s alive in Spielberg’s ideas of Golda Meir and Tinker Bell. But Michelle Williams contributes these flourishes of showbiz maternity; her Mitzi seems like Liza Minnelli sharing a body with her mother, Judy Garland. Read More
Williams has to summon unwavering affection, passionate discontent and ardent delight, and she has to do so in a performance that, in crucial moments, can’t be conventionally expressed, because it must be exposed. See, Mitzi’s burgeoning movie-director son discovers that he has captured her secret love affair in his home movies. They’re his own personal Zapruder film: He pauses the footage, slows it down, rewinds and replays it. Williams has to conjure motion and feeling — hands held and batted away; elation, inhibition and shame — that are imperceptible at the standard 24 frames per second but blinding at half that speed, gestures that reveal just as much in reverse as they do unspooling. She has to create action that a teenage boy will find murderous even as we, watching, are devastated for her. It’s an arduous trick of technique that Williams floods with natural light: dawns and sunsets that justify the way everybody orbits Mitzi. But Williams is acting the toll of all that brilliance — a private eclipse. — W.M. Read a review
Corio
“Aftersun”
Usually an actor playing a protagonist’s younger self appears in flashbacks or early, background-providing scenes. Childhood is the land of memory and possibility; the past is the shadow and foreshadowing of the present. Read More
In “Aftersun,” the director Charlotte Wells reverses this perspective. Sophie is, at 11, a vivid presence, enjoying (mostly) a vacation with her loving, feckless father, Calum, played by Paul Mescal. A future Sophie, who has lost Calum, appears in dreamlike sequences, reeling with grief as she tries to hold onto him. Meanwhile — years before — at a middling resort on the Turkish coast, Sophie tries to figure out her father, her surroundings and her quickly-changing inner world. On the verge of adolescence, she is fascinated by some of the teenagers at the resort: their bodies, words, squabbles and flirtations. At the same time, with Calum, she’s as snuggly as a puppy and entirely a child.
To say that Frankie Corio is believable as young Sophie is to risk understating her accomplishment and stating the obvious. Twelve when the movie was released, she hardly had to pretend. But at the same time, she had to un-self-consciously convey the shifting of Sophie’s consciousness, toward an understanding of her father that is at once less worshipful and more forgiving. She is a happy child, in one of the saddest movies you’ll ever see. — A.O.S. Read a review
Gibbs
“Down With the King”
Like many hip-hop artists, Freddie Gibbs is a master builder and deconstructor of personas. In “Space Rabbit,” a track from his most recent album, he likens himself to a “skinny Suge Knight,” an image of swaggering menace leavened by a wink of irony. In the video, Gibbs, one of whose nicknames is Big Boss Rabbit, is accompanied by a sidekick in a bunny costume, a visual that undermines the lyrics’ rapid-fire celebration of sex, drugs and criminal life. Even as Gibbs projects hardness, there’s something vulnerable about his sad-eyed countenance and world-weary vocals. Read More
In “Down With the King,” his movie-acting debut, Gibbs plays Mercury Maxwell, known as Money Merc, a successful rapper in the throes of a midcareer malaise. Merc, like Gibbs, spits rhymes about hustling and hedonism, but his head and heart may no longer be in the game. Withdrawing to a rambling house in rural New England, he spends his days contemplating nature, doing chores and getting to know his neighbors. What is supposed to be a temporary retreat while he incubates his next albums turns into an existential crisis. Can Merc fulfill the expectations of his manager and his fans without betraying himself?
There’s real suspense attached to this question, but Gibbs and the film’s director, Diego Ongaro, choose nuance over drama. “Down With the King” is a quiet movie, and it’s true to life in a way that isn’t likely to start arguments on social media or vacuum up award nominations. It doesn’t sentimentalize rural life, and it doesn’t glorify show business either, but instead weighs the competing claims of ambition and friendship, contemplation and work. Merc’s predicament is excruciatingly real, which is to say that Gibbs’s performance is as good as it gets. — A.O.S. Read a review
Gleeson
“The Banshees of Inisherin”
What does Brendan Gleeson bring to “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Martin McDonagh’s deceptively breezy tale of a friendship gone sour in an Irish village? Gravity and gloom. Also levity and surprise. He’s the most serious person in the film, and the most mischievous. The heavy — ill tempered, saturnine, destructive — with an exquisitely light touch. Read More
“Harry Potter” fans will know Gleeson as Mad-Eye Moody, a somewhat chaotic Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. Just about anyone who has watched a movie in the past 30 years will remember seeing this prolific character actor, who has appeared in action movies, in a Shakespeare adaptation, in “Paddington 2.” His sandpaper brogue and weathered features are impossible to forget. In “Banshees” he reunites with Colin Farrell, his co-star in McDonagh’s “In Bruges.” This time, Gleeson is Colm, a melancholy fiddler and composer who abruptly terminates his longstanding friendship with Farrell’s Pádraic, a genial, needy cowherd. The arbitrariness of the separation, and the self-directed violence with which Colm enforces it — he threatens to cut off his own fingers if Pádraic so much as speaks to him — is the movie’s great mystery. Why does he feel this way?
Instead of providing an answer, Gleeson takes us into the unquiet mind of a man whose profound unhappiness is its own kind of life force. In his billowing black greatcoat and wide-brimmed hat, Colm barrels across the island of Inisherin like a foul-weather system. But his despair is the film’s primary source of energy, and Gleeson marshals it with a relish that is hard to distinguish from joy. — A.O.S. Read a review
Krieps
“Corsage”
Empress Elisabeth of Austria was one of the most famous and powerful European women of the 19th century, and she has been a fixture of European popular culture ever since. She was at the center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s artistic ferment and political intrigue until her assassination in 1898. The subject of operas, plays, books and ballets, she has been portrayed onscreen by Romy Schneider (more than once), Ava Gardner and Cara Delevingne. That history is now moot. In “Corsage,” Vicky Krieps creates the empress from scratch. Read More
The film, directed by Marie Kreutzer, is as strange and captivating as its heroine. It isn’t a corseted costume drama, a camp spectacle or a “Crown”-like study of the workings of royal power, though it plays with all of those possibilities. Taking brazen liberties with the historical record, “Corsage” — which is to say, Krieps — imagines Elisabeth as an exotic, captive creature who bends the bars of her cage into a kinky, kinetic sculpture. The empress’s life is a highly scripted sequence of rituals, but she never seems less than completely free, even when she suffers. And Krieps, within Kreutzer’s highly stylized, insouciantly anachronistic vision of the past, feels so real, so modern, that she can dazzle you and break your heart at the same time. — A.O.S. Read a profile
Palmer
“Nope”
Sibling stories are hardly rare onscreen — there’s no “Godfather” without the Corleone brothers, no “Little Women” without the March sisters — but few movies delve into the brother-sister dynamic as deeply as “Nope.” You can’t imagine Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ and Keke Palmer’s Emerald without each other. They’re inseparable, even though a lot of the time they can barely stand to be in the same room. Read More
Their volatile relationship is the comic and emotional engine that drives this wild adventure, which is part western, part satire, part alien-invasion science-fiction horror spectacle. At first we see Emerald as OJ does, which is as an annoyance. In his own mind, he’s the strong, silent, stoic cowboy type, sitting astride a horse and scanning the horizon with his melancholy eyes. She is an avatar of anarchy, a whirlwind of elbows and opinions and resentments. But Palmer is not just magnetic; she’s also persuasive, and she pulls us over to her side. Emerald is revealed to be a doer, a planner, a woman of action and a formidable wit, on hand to puncture her brother’s self-regard and jolt him out of his brooding. And also do what’s necessary to save the family ranch from the space monster.
The rivalry between Emerald and OJ — dating back to childhood and made newly acute by the death of their father and the state of the family business — is real, and so is the reconciliation. By the end, the intuitive bond that once connected them is re-established. You see that in Palmer’s eyes, and in Kaluuya’s as he gazes at her with the same wonder and admiration that the audience has come to feel. — A.O.S. Read a profile
Bernthal
“We Own This City”
We don’t need another good actor playing a bad cop. I, for one, have seen enough. At least, that’s what I thought before I witnessed Jon Bernthal in “We Own This City,” a six-part HBO mini-series about the moral swamps of law enforcement in Baltimore, written by some supreme American-crime artists (David Simon, George Pelecanos, Ed Burns) and concerning, in part, a task force that, even by the most alarmist standards, is disgustingly corrupt. In its opening sequence, Bernthal’s character, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, stands uniformed at a lectern, facing his fellow officers, and delivers a five-minute monologue that’s essentially about the bendability of laws they’re meant to enforce. It’s an extraordinary introduction, both to the ethical bankruptcy at the thematic heart of the show and to Bernthal’s mission as an actor. In that introduction, Jenkins struts up and down, jamming his thumbs under his waistband with the consummate arrogance of a movie sheriff. When he’s done, the room applauds. He pretends to demur, but that’s his first lie. For Bernthal knows that Jenkins is himself an actor. He knows he just rocked the troops at Agincourt. Read More
His depiction of professional corruption is different from every other sleazy cop I’ve seen. He’s light, dancerly in his cockiness, vain, a shamelessly voluble actor who gets close to caricature without ever losing his grip on humanity, even when it’s this toxic. He gives Jenkins a screwy Bawlmer accent. He keeps himself both stiffened and slack-jawed, as if the character’s venality is a shock even to himself. Bernthal dares to make vibrant the sort of deluded power that abuts foolishness, a corruption that comes so naturally to Jenkins that you can smell it on him: All he serves and protects is himself. — W.M. Read a review
Additional design and development by Jacky Myint
Wesley Morris is a staff writer for The Times Magazine and critic at large. A.O. Scott is a chief film critic for The Times. Ryan McGinley is a photographer based in New York, known for documenting activism on behalf of L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights as well as for work that incorporates the human body throughout American landscapes.
StylistBernat Buscato
StudiosLONDON The Lemonade Factory; MKII studio
LOS ANGELES Naked Eye Studio
NEW YORK XX Venue c/o Allison Rapson & Kassidy Brown; Location Agent: Andrea Raisfeld
ProductionLONDON Producer: Farago Projects; Movement Director: Yagamoto; Set Designer: Miguel Bento
LOS ANGELES Producer: 3Star Productions; Movement Director: Melissa Schade; Set Designer: Heath Mattioli
NEW YORK Producer: Hen’s Tooth Productions; Movement Director: Elena Vazintaris; Set Designer: Lauren Nikrooz
StylingJON BERNTHAL Grooming: Kim Verbeck; Top: Givenchy; Pants: Givenchy
FRANKIE CORIO Hair: Claire Grech; Makeup: Chloe Holt; Top: Melitta Baumeister
FREDDIE GIBBS Barber: Neal Smith; Grooming: Nichole Servin; Suit: Willy Chavarria; Shoes: Nike
BRENDAN GLEESON Grooming: Gareth Bromell; Jacket: Versace; Top: Prada
DANIEL KALUUYA Stylists: Marquise Miller & Aaron Christmon; Barber: Damon Elleston; Grooming: Ben Talbott; Jacket, pants, shoes: Valentino; Cape: Patrick McDowell
VICKY KRIEPS Hair: Rebekah Forecast; Makeup: Gita Bass; Skirt and dress: Melitta Baumeister
THUSO MBEDU Hair: Sharif Poston; Makeup: Wendi Miyake; Coat: The Attico from Albright Fashion Library; Skirt and leggings: Balenciaga from Albright Fashion Library; Coat: Gucci from Albright Fashion Library
KEKE PALMER Hair: Ann Jones; Makeup: Mylah Morales; Coat dress: Bottega Veneta from Albright Fashion library
MICHELLE WILLIAMS Hair: Mara Roszak; Makeup: Angela Levin; Dress: Ralph & Russo from Albright Fashion Library; Top and skirt: Proenza Schouler; Shoes: Calvin Klein
MICHELLE YEOH Hair: Earl Simms; Makeup: Polly Osmond; Coat and pants: The Row; Top: Donna Karan; Dress: Balenciaga; Shoes: Manolo Blahnik from Albright Fashion Library