What makes a great performance? In the past, we might have said that it expresses something ineffably, thrillingly human, but our current dystopia seems determined to press the point. This year, the company Particle6 unveiled the A.I.-generated “actress” Tilly Norwood, a fresh-faced brunette who was reportedly “seeking representation” in Hollywood. Why a synthetic creation would need an agent to take a cut of its earnings is anyone’s guess, but Tilly’s big début sent the industry into its latest paroxysm. That, along with other A.I. experiments, such as the garishly magnified version of “The Wizard of Oz” at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, raised the question: Will the performances of the future even be human? At times, even flesh-and-blood acting had an uncanny-valley quality. Ryan Murphy’s legal drama “All’s Fair” stars Kim Kardashian (as Tilly Norwood-ish a human being as we have) alongside such talents as Glenn Close, Niecy Nash, and Naomi Watts—all reduced to what seemed like hollow simulacra of themselves.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
I bring up these worst performances to throw the best ones into relief. Somehow, in an entertainment industry increasingly drawn to the artificial, actual people did extraordinary things, whether on the big screen, on the small screen, on a stage, or in a recording studio. The following list spans genres, from period drama to existential sci-fi, from animation to documentary. Some of these performers are matinée idols, while others are offbeat character actors who found the perfect vehicle for their idiosyncrasies. One of them has been dead for two years. The caveats: I couldn’t fit everyone I loved, and I certainly haven’t seen everything. But these ten performances (plus the honorably mentioned) made indelible marks on our culture, and on me.
Seth Rogen in “The Studio”
The antic Apple TV comedy stars Rogen as Matt Remick, the frazzled head of the fictitious Continental Studios. Remick is a cinephile who nevertheless finds himself green-lighting a Kool-Aid movie and screwing over the auteurs he reveres. Rogen, who directed the series with Evan Goldberg, brings a beleaguered panic to the role, but at its heart is disillusionment: the modern studio head is less a dashing impresario in the Robert Evans mold than an impotent middle manager, doomed to massage egos and churn out I.P.-driven schlock. Some critics found “The Studio” too mild as Hollywood satire, but I’d argue that it’s less satire than farce, with Rogen—who has evolved nicely from stoner doofus to middle-aged neurotic—leading a pack of expert clowns, including Kathryn Hahn, Ike Barinholtz, and Catherine O’Hara. I’d watch him do commedia dell’arte—maybe Carlo Goldoni’s “The Servant of Two Masters”?
Honorable mention: “The Studio” is stuffed with great cameos (Sarah Polley, Zoë Kravitz), but the most surprising might be from Martin Scorsese, in the pilot episode, showing the unlikely comic chops he’s revealed in his daughter Francesca’s TikTok videos. For more of Marty as himself, see Rebecca Miller’s five-part docuseries “Mr. Scorsese.”
Emma Stone in “Bugonia”
Stone was on my list in 2023, the year she gave two discomfiting comic performances, in the Showtime series “The Curse” and in the Yorgos Lanthimos film “Poor Things.” After winning her second Best Actress Oscar, for the latter, she teamed up with Lanthimos again in this dark-comic adaptation of the South Korean flick “Save the Green Planet!” Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceuticals C.E.O. abducted by a conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons) who thinks she’s an alien in disguise. Is she? Stone is utterly convincing as a steely girlboss, but her performance is laced with enough strangeness to keep us guessing. Fuller couldn’t be further from the guileless, pleasure-seeking woman-child Stone played in “Poor Things,” but she’s proven that she has the range to match her daring, uningratiating choices. As a producer, of “Bugonia” and other projects, she’s just as canny.
Honorable mention: In the long-awaited second season of “Severance,” another eerie, sci-fi-inflected take on corporate malevolence, Britt Lower returned as the defiant “innie” Helly R., but we also got to know her “outie,” Helena Eagan—like Fuller, a C-suite ice queen with a knack for manipulation.
Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper in “Adolescence”
Playing father and son, Graham and Cooper anchored this bracing Netflix miniseries, about a sweet-looking thirteen-year-old in Yorkshire who is arrested for the murder of a female classmate. Cooper, who was fourteen and unknown when he filmed the show, revealed his character’s manosphere-addled psyche by terrifying degrees. Graham, who created the series with Jack Thorne, was equally riveting as the salt-of-the-earth dad who goes from defiantly protective to haunted by the violence he missed brewing within his own son. Because each of the four episodes was filmed in one continuous shot, Graham’s and Cooper’s performances required an unusual level of technical and emotional prowess. Both won Emmys, as did Erin Doherty, as a forensic psychologist out of her depth.
Honorable mention: Doherty’s win was well-deserved, but I was rooting for Jenny Slate, who shone in another limited series, FX’s “Dying for Sex,” as a woman whose best friend (Michelle Williams) has terminal cancer. Slate drew on her standup-comedy kookiness to create a grounded portrait of platonic love and the strain of caretaking.
Sarah Snook in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
Hot off “Succession,” Snook stormed Broadway in Kip Williams’s one-woman adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel. “One-woman” might be a misnomer, actually; while Snook did play twenty-six characters—all expertly delineated by accent, costume, and demeanor—she was joined by a hive of crew members doing complicated camera work. Sometimes Snook was onstage in the flesh and projected on screens at once, playing opposite herself, like a Victorian hall of mirrors. This allowed her to show off her skills as a stage performer, alongside the sly closeup work we know from her years as Shiv Roy—all while spitting out Wilde’s prose with motormouthed alacrity. Having won an Olivier for her performance on the West End, Snook handily took home a Tony Award.
Honorable mention: Elsewhere on Broadway, Jonathan Groff is playing Bobby Darin in the bio-musical “Just in Time,” only a year after his Tony-winning performance in “Merrily We Roll Along.” The musical is also not a solo show, but it rests on Groff’s capable shoulders. Singing “Mack the Knife” and “Splish Splash,” he’s absolutely croon-worthy.
Michael B. Jordan in “Sinners”
Is there any challenge for an actor more delicious than playing identical twins? In Ryan Coogler’s vampire blockbuster, Jordan plays brothers nicknamed Smoke and Stack, who open up a juke joint in Jim Crow-era Mississippi and are set upon by soul suckers. Jordan infused his dual role—the practical Smoke and the wily Stack—with subtle variations on his megawatt charisma, clearly relishing the task. He’s both dapper and sleazy, heroic and menacing, laid back and full of fight. Like Stone and Lanthimos, he and Coogler have enjoyed a long collaboration, dating back to their breakout film, “Fruitvale Station,” in 2013, and continuing through “Creed” and the “Black Panther” franchise. By now, the director knows how to play his leading man like a fine-tuned instrument—say, a resonator guitar. So why not have two of him?
Honorable mention: In James Sweeney’s “Twinless,” a dark queer drama that made a splash at Sundance, Dylan O’Brien also plays identical twins—one straight and bro-y, one gay and sardonic—with such skill that he really seems like two different actors.
Paul Reubens in “Pee-wee as Himself”
Yes, Reubens died in 2023, and, yes, sitting for a documentary interview may not seem like a performance. But the way that Reubens toyed with the director, Matt Wolf, was as engrossing and layered as any role he’d ever played. By turns revealing and obscuring himself, Reubens would play games with the camera—you never quite knew if he was letting you in or pushing you away—as he narrated his life as Paul, as Pee-wee Herman, and as a pariah. One thing that he didn’t tell Wolf, perhaps owing to his relentless need for control, was that he was dying. In retrospect, Reubens’s looming mortality added one more facet to his half-confessional, half-facetious unburdening. In the end, it was impossible for a cutup like Reubens to sit in front of a camera and not perform for it.
Honorable mention: Also playing himself: Satan, who, by any measure, has had quite a year. But his appearance on the Trump-baiting new episodes of “South Park” was some of his best work yet. This Lord of Darkness is a melancholy beefcake carrying the demon spawn of his neglectful lover, President Trump, a rebound from his previous boyfriend, Saddam Hussein. Poor lug!
Jessie Buckley in “Hamnet”
What Buckley is asked to do in Chloé Zhao’s film, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, would make any actor blanch. Buckley plays Agnes Hathaway, who becomes the wife of William Shakespeare and then loses their eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, to the plague. Summoning a mother’s grief is daunting enough, but Buckley’s remarkable performance also includes scenes of mystical communion with nature (Agnes is said to be the daughter of a forest witch), courtship with Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare, and harrowing childbirth. The film’s climax, at a performance of “Hamlet” at the Globe, rests on Buckley’s face, as open and anguished as a wound. The Irish actress, who has stunned in films such as “The Lost Daughter” and “Women Talking,” is now the frontrunner in this year’s Best Actress race. (She also reads the audiobook of O’Farrell’s novel.)
Honorable mention: As another mother cleaved from her child, Teyana Taylor brought spunk and eroticism to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” as the revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills. The shot of her popping off a machine gun, pregnant belly exposed, may be the year’s defining screen image. Even after she disappears, she haunts the rest of the movie.
Bad Bunny in “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí”
I didn’t get to see Bad Bunny’s tour live, for good reason: the Latin-trap superstar pointedly skipped the mainland United States, out of concern that his fans would be subject to immigration raids. Instead, he took up a thirty-one-show residency at Puerto Rico’s largest indoor arena. The concerts electrified the battered island where Bad Bunny was born and served as a sharp rebuke to Trump’s America, with the artist in a straw pava hat, flanked by drummers and revellers on a lush, grassy set. My colleague Kelefa Sanneh went to see the show there in August and described the artist as “the person future generations will point to when they talk about what the early twenty-twenties sounded like.” The rest of us had to make do with an Amazon livestream, or with his hosting gig on “Saturday Night Live.” Next year, he headlines the Super Bowl halftime show, whether the Trump Administration likes it or not.
Honorable mention: Hell hath no fury like a pop artist scorned. Witness Lily Allen, whose new album, “West End Girl,” came on the heels of her breakup with the actor David Harbour. In catchy, deceptively mellow pop, Allen catalogues heartbreaks and betrayals—the image of a Duane Reade bag filled with butt plugs and lube is not one we’ll soon forget.
Noah Wyle in “The Pitt”
Years after playing John Carter on “ER,” Wyle returned with another medical drama, on HBO Max, as Michael Robinavitch, known at the Pittsburgh hospital where he works as Dr. Robby. To see the bumbling young Carter morph into the world-weary, aggrieved Dr. Robby—still shell-shocked by his mentor’s death during the depths of COVID—had undeniable poignancy. (The series’ resemblance to “ER” has become a matter of legal dispute.) During the course of fifteen episodes, each of which tracked an hour of an eventful day at an under-resourced emergency room, Dr. Robby’s stress and compassion and sorrow played out over Wyle’s face, with its hard-earned lines and strikingly forked nose. Wyle showed us the burdens that hospital workers are asked to bear, navigating life and death and trying not to sink under the weight of it all.
Honorable mention: “The Pitt” wouldn’t have worked without its sprawling, sterling ensemble, but I was particularly moved by Taylor Dearden, as Dr. Melissa King, a brainy, sensitive soul who has a sister with autism and is neurodivergent herself. (Dearden is the daughter of Bryan Cranston—who was also brilliant on “The Studio.”)
Timothée Chalamet in “Marty Supreme”
In recent years, Chalamet has claimed his throne as the king of Christmas, playing the likes of Bob Dylan and Willy Wonka in big holiday releases. This month, he’s back as another talented jerk, the scrappy, swaggering table-tennis champion at the center of Josh Safdie’s A24 film. His character, Marty Mauser, loosely inspired by the Ping-Pong legend Marty Reisman, is a cocky troublemaker who can talk himself out of any jam or into any woman’s bed. He knows how good he is, at table tennis and at seduction, which makes him equally beguiling and insufferable—the street-smart Jewish hero Chalamet was born to play. I saw a press screening, but, if you need your Timmy fix before Christmas, check out the eighteen-minute parody video he put online, in which he baffles the film’s marketing team with deranged promotional ideas.
Honorable mention: In “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a film that shares DNA with “Marty Supreme” (both are high-anxiety A24 movies with several common producers, including Safdie), Rose Byrne plays a harried mother on the edge of implosion—a formidable turn that reinforced the actress’s fearlessness and range. ♦
