In a yearof tragedy and isolation, the best screen actors gave us more than just diversion. Here are Great Performers 2020:Curated by Wesley Morris & A.O. Scott
“High Fidelity” is on Hulu ● Photograph by Christopher Anderson 1. Zoë Kravitz showed us how to play it cool.
To love Zoë Kravitz is to fear two minutes of screen time a pop. The longer she’s got, the smokier and more incandescent she gets. “High Fidelity,” a series remake of the 2000 movie, is almost all her, simmering as a heartsick record-shop owner named Rob. She moves through her breakups and bad decisions serenely unfazed. In Episode 5, Rob goes to town on a mansplaining lech who doubts she knows her Bowie and McCartney. My pulse shot up. Kravitz’s seemed fine. We were watching a star casually announce herself. Hulu, sadly, canceled the show. But not before we saw what Kravitz could do with something intended as all hers: own it. — W.M.
2. Julia Garner absorbed the banality of male evil. Watch trailer Think of “The Assistant” as a short story that has pared its protagonist down to her eyes and ears. It shows us one Monday in the life of an office drone toiling for an unseen film producer, whose verbal and implied sexual abuse reek of Harvey Weinstein’s. Julia Garner works for him — making copies, arranging meetings, taking increasingly desperate calls from his wife. The role entails humdrum labor: readying, dispensing, scrubbing, tidying. Garner is caught in the gap between the appalling norms of this workplace and her character’s personal ethics. She never verbalizes her dismay; the slump in her posture and the lengthening of her face are all the indictment the movie needs. — W.M. “The Assistant” is on Hulu ● Photograph by Christopher Anderson
Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), whose coming-of-age is at the center of the sitcom “Never Have I Ever,” is a smart girl. That’s expected of her. For the daughter of a demanding Indian mother, academic achievement is nonnegotiable. Devi is also intelligent in other ways, though like many adolescents, she doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does. She does think, however. There aren’t many shows that have so persuasively dramatized a young person’s intellectual development. Nor are there many performers who have captured that growth as insightfully as Ramakrishnan. When we witness Devi’s mind expanding, what we are really beholding is Ramakrishnan’s brilliance.— A.O.S “Never Have I Ever” is on Netflix ● Photograph by Christopher Anderson
4. Ethan Hawke embodied a fanatical, unbearable rectitude. Watch trailer If there’s a dignified way to play murderous zealotry, I’m sure I don’t want to see it. Give me Ethan Hawke’s lunatic passions every time. In “The Good Lord Bird,” a series based on James McBride’s grim, absurdist novel, Hawke plays the abolitionist John Brown with five-alarm irreverence. He lowers his voice until its setting is “Tom Waits.” His hair flies; his baby blues seem primed to burst. Brown’s volcanic eruptions vault Hawke beyond acting into possession. That’s an apt tribute to an extremist whose approach to what we would call wokeness is insomnia. Hawke plays him as if he doesn’t know what sleep is. — W.M. “The Good Lord Bird” is on Showtime ● Photograph by Christopher Anderson
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is in theatrical release ● Photograph by Djeneba Aduayom 5. Viola Davis’s Ma Rainey was a woman unapologetic about her worth.
‘When you’re creating a character, the most important thing you can do is observe life.’
Read the interview6. Sophia Loren still reigns after 70 years of stardom.
In “The Life Ahead,” based on a novel by Romain Gary, Sophia Loren plays Rosa, a retired Italian prostitute who becomes a kind of foster grandmother to a young African refugee. The film, directed by Loren’s son Edoardo Ponti, is warm and a little sentimental in its humanism, which makes it a perfect vehicle for Loren’s undimmed charisma. At 86, a movie star since her teenage years, she has nothing left to prove. But she still has everything that made her the reigning icon of Italian cinema for so long. She is as majestic as ever, but also essentially and passionately populist — a screen goddess whose domain has always been the world of mere mortals. — A.O.S. “The Life Ahead” is on Netflix ● Photograph by Christopher Anderson
Photograph by Malike Sidibe 7. Sarah Cooper’s TikToks gave us Trump as he might have been.
Her lip-synced version of the president engaged with other people. He was curious about the world and capable of creative thought.
See her feed8. Kylie Brakeman was incomparable as a high-strung Yankee. See her feed Her TikTok characters are crazy and scary and a danger to democracy. They’re also your friends, your co-workers, your aunts. Maybe even you. — A.O.S. Photograph by Djeneba Aduayom
9. Jeff Wright mastered the 60-second internet video. See his feed The stand-up comic’s “tight five” building to a big laugh at the end has been replaced by a streamlined two minutes ending in an abrupt cut. You wonder what you’re watching, and as soon as you figure it out, it’s over. Then you watch it again. — A.O.S. Photograph by Malike Sidibe
10. Blaire Erskine spoofed an anthology of notable MAGA women. See her feed There is Matt Gaetz’s assistant, Corey Lewandowski’s wife, Tiffany Trump’s new best friend — recording strenuously peppy, sometimes frantic bulletins by the flickering light of the national dumpster fire. — A.O.S. Photograph by Nydia Blas
“Moonstruck” is free on Youtube ● Photograph by Christopher Anderson 11. Cher’s radiant performance in ‘Moonstruck’ warmed us in quarantine.
To appreciate the scale of the central miracle of this film, a person must talk to Cher, who is even more like herself than you imagine.
Read the profile12. Cristin Milioti & Andy Samberg loved euphorically.Watch trailer Whatever “Palm Springs” is — a romantic science-fiction wedding-comedy fable? — Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg went everywhere it needed them to go: to the same wedding scores of times. Samberg has always seemed to be made of Nerf, but his neon squish doesn’t spring back as fast here. Now he’s suave, confident, moody. When Milioti’s character learns why today never quite gets to tomorrow, the news enrages her. Then she gets to work on the dozen other feelings it inspires. Samberg’s boyishness has at last found what it needed: an adult to spike his juice box with a glug of tequila. — W.M. “Palm Springs” is on Hulu ● Photographs by Christopher Anderson
13. Fathia Youssouf brought precocious assurance to scandal.
Before “Cuties” dropped on Netflix, a petition circulated to halt distribution, claiming that it exploited young girls. Had its detractors actually seen it, they would have discovered something — someone — far more complex: Fathia Youssouf. She’s Amy, the 11-year-old daughter of a fractured African immigrant family, who is taken in by a tween dance troupe. Youssouf’s eyes record every scrap of domestic news, each new twist of the hips. The culminating dance is indeed shocking for its lasciviousness. But afterward, Youssouf’s guilt is even more so. She works with such stillness and gumption that the only body worth petitioning is the Academy. — W.M. “Cuties” is on Netflix ● Photograph by Christopher Anderson
“I May Destroy You” is on HBO ● Photograph by Gareth McConnell 14. Michaela Coel revealed the many faces of trauma.
With ‘I May Destroy You,’ she set out to disturb, first by making us laugh, then by going to all kinds of extremes.
Watch trailer15. Hannah Gadsby showed the humor in expertly wielded wrath.
Her intrepidness in her stand-up special “Douglas” is moving, like watching someone defuse a grenade by swallowing it. Some of the surprise is that you don’t expect this kind of surgical fury from someone so fashionably bespectacled and in such flashy Nikes and a suit of such vivid, affable blue, someone who looks like the director of a tugboat library. — W.M. “Douglas” is on Netflix ● Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya
17. Radha Blank re-invented the self-deprecating New York crank.
If the character in “The Forty-Year-Old Version” has her doubts — about the depth of her talent, about the thickness of her body — Blank doesn’t hesitate to throw them in the mix. She’s feisty, huffy, exuberant, present, ready for everything and very funny. — W.M. “The Forty-Year-Old Version” is on Netflix ● Photograph by Malike Sidibe
18. Jack Dylan Grazer & Jordan Kristine Seamón reimagined teen angst.Watch trailer “We Are Who We Are” is Luca Guadagnino’s dreamy, horny, naturalistic soap opera about life on an American Army base in Chioggia, Italy. The grown-up soldiers have their share of drama, but the feverish pulse of the series belongs to the children, notably Fraser (Jack Dylan Grazer) and Caitlin (Jordan Kristine Seamón). They share an impatience with norms of gender and sexuality and a drive to forge new identities. To capture their coming-of-age, Grazer and Seamón draw on techniques of performance — cool, strange, radically empathic — that they seem to be discovering in real time. — A.O.S. “We Are Who We Are” is on HBO ● Photographs by Christopher Anderson
19. Luca Marinelli personified the old-fashioned movie star. Watch trailer On paper, Martin Eden is a traditional movie-star role: a man of humble origins and great ambitions who rises in the world and pays a heavy price for his ascent. Pietro Marcello’s “Martin Eden,” a faithful deconstruction of Jack London’s novel, both fulfills and defies this template. But Luca Marinelli’s Martin exists on a plane beyond ambiguity. As handsome as a classic screen idol — Rudolph Valentino? Gary Cooper? Paul Newman? Alain Delon? all of the above? — he has the wit to play Martin with utter sincerity, as a man who believes that his own destiny and human progress are identical. Watching him, you believe it, too. — A.O.S. “Martin Eden” is in theatrical release ● Photograph by Christopher Anderson
20. Zoe Kazan showed us the fierceness of motherhood. Watch trailer The role of mother in a mini-series based on a Philip Roth novel is not for the faint of heart. In the first episodes of “The Plot Against America,” Bess Levin herself seems a bit fainthearted, her quiet maternal capability overshadowed by her husband’s bluster, her sons’ anxieties and the political crisis enveloping the family. By the end, it’s Bess who turns out to be the heart and backbone of the story. In Zoe Kazan’s hands — in the modulations of her voice, in her tiny adjustments of posture and gesture — the line between meekness and ferocity dissolves, and a Newark housewife takes on the grandeur of a character in myth. — A.O.S. “The Plot Against America” is on HBO ● Photograph by Gareth McConnell
21. Jason Sudeikis revealed a football coach’s soul. Watch trailer “Ted Lasso” is a sitcom about a Kansas football coach recruited to lead an English soccer club. Its premise is as baffling as its star’s performance. How has Jason Sudeikis lined this caricature with this much soul? Coach Ted is a goober, barging into offices and banging into people with that blaring twang. In the eyes of the English, he’s a dolt. Sudeikis begs to differ. It’s a cunning piece of acting — broad as a boulevard yet veined by alleyways of solitude and sagacity. The key to the performance is culinary: Ted’s a secret gourmand, and Sudeikis works accordingly. He’s savoring what a lesser star would gnaw. — W.M. “Ted Lasso” is on Apple TV+ ● Photograph by Christopher Anderson
Credits
Wesley Morris is a critic at large at The New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine. A.O. Scott is a chief film critic at The Times and the author of “Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty and Truth.” His article about Susan Sontag, published in the magazine last year, was recently republished in “The Best American Essays 2020.”
Djeneba Aduayom is a French photographer living in the Los Angeles area. Her art, which focuses on the connection between people and movement, is inspired by her multicultural background and her previous career as a professional dancer. Christopher Anderson is the author of seven photographic books, including “Pia,” published earlier this year. He lives in Paris. Gareth McConnell is a photographer and publisher who was born in Northern Ireland and lives in London. His work has been the subject of seven monographs. He started the ongoing art project Sorika. Malike Sidibe is a photographer in New York who grew up in Guinea. His work has been exhibited, most recently, at Bathhouse Studios and the Annenberg Space for Photography. Mamadi Doumbouya is a photographer based in NYC. He regularly photographs the magazine's Talk column. Nydia Blas is a photographer based in Atlanta. Her last assignment for the magazine was a portrait of poet laureate Tracy K. Smith.
Additional photo credits:
Stylists Blank: Kelly Augustine. Brakeman: Rebecca Ramsey. Coel: Victoria Sekrier. Cooper: Madison Guest. Davis: Elizabeth Stewart. Erskine and Konkle: Rebecca Ramsey. Garner: Elizabeth Saltzman. Grazer: Tiffany Briseno. Kazan: Aimee Croysdill. Milioti: Shiona Turini. Wright: Cannon.
Grooming Grazer: Sonia Lee. Wright: Kumi Craig.
Hair Cooper: Miguel Lledo. Davis: Jamika Wilson. Garner: Blake Erik. Kazan: Earl Simms. Milioti: Clayton Hawkins. Seamón: Mark Alan.
Makeup Blank: Autumn Johnson. Coel: Alex Babsky. Cooper: Miguel Lledo. Davis: Autumn Moultrie. Garner: Min Min Ma. Kazan: Emma White Turle. Milioti: Loren Canby. Seamón: Molly Fredenberg.
Additional design and development Jacky Myint.
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