9 BRILLIANT ACTORS I LOVE BECAUSE THEY CAN PULL OFF ANY ROLE.

By Harshit and Ahona

JULIETTE BINOCHE

In a career spanning three decades, Binoche has worked with practically half the auteurs who defined modern cinema Godard, Haneke, Kieślowski, Kiarostami, Cronenberg, Kore-eda, Claire Denis. The range of characters, cultures, genres, film movements that she has explored is monumental. I started and completed a semester of Film Studies with her work. Binoche stitches her performance into her characters, becoming them with such striking grace and compelling vulnerability that you truly see the power of an actor unleashed in her.

TONY LEUNG

I don't know if this will make sense but Tony Leung knows what he needs to withhold in his performance. The man has a kind of hypnotising screen presence, an effortless, consuming intensity. Held in Wong Kar-wai's portraiture of masculinity, especially, Tony Leung's artistry is nothing short of a marvel. He is one of the very few actors who have played so many different shades of romance on screen. And he approaches the camera with this beautiful silence, like he is indulging your interpretation of the character instead of really feeding you his version of it.

TABU

Tabu has played a formidable range of people in her career (I say "people" instead of "characters" because she has always humanised them through her performance). She has traversed the range of womanhood to a far greater degree than what any of us realise, from fierce yet fragile mothers to alluring, daunting femme fatales. In my humble reading of her work, I have always felt that she is an artist of both words and silences she delivers the lines of the people she plays as though those words occured naturally in that context, and she dazzles in the silences of her part.

DANIEL KALUUYA

Kaluuya is a masterclass in subtlety. I do not think Get Out would have been the film that it is without the gradation kaluuya brings to his performance as the film dials up from the passive aggressive violence at the beginning, to the intense, deeply disturbing brutality it shows at the end. Kaluuya's presence in the frame is so captivating that it kind of guides your attention through the films he has been a part of. I always find myself looking at his reactions in a scene where someone else is speaking. It is like he is anchoring the film in reality through his performance.

COLIN FARRELL

I do not know how many people have noticed, but Farrell has had the two most iconic cinematic moments in 2022. One, he has shamed Batman for not knowing his Spanish in Matt Reeves' The Batman. Two, he has had the finest comeback in The Banshees of Inisherin - "And yet' he says, like he is English". If Farrell continues with this range of work, from In Bruges to After Yang, he will in fact convince me that he is multiplying into different people with same faces. I also truly believe that his body of work should be the inspiration for many aspiring actors.

MERYL STREEP

Streep's body of work represents a web of cultures and psyches. Streep has been magnificent, fragile, dynamic, undismissable, contemplative - you name it and she has played it. Streep's understanding of, not only her characters, but their greater contexts, makes her one of the most aware artists of our time - someone who has held on to the values of art as they have to the impact of it. Also, she is an absolute riot at poker-faced performances, like she is unrelenting about what her character is thinking while also amplifying the part through her non-chalance.

ROBERT DE NIRO

I don't know how to put it more effectively - but I feel like Robert De Niro can perform the cultural angst of every generation. He can play the post-modern, disillusioned antio-hero of Taxi Driver. He can play the truck-hijacking mafia in Goodfellas. He can play the haunted sleep- deprived detective in Insomnia. Actors like him show you the kind of social awareness and cultural knowledge you would have to become such diverse people. Plus, his performances remain ever-relevant, ever-watchable, ever-contextual.

OLIVIA COLMAN

I have always felt that Colman has that rare ability to make the most subversive genres feel completely natural through her performance. Think of her in The Lobster. I do not think anybody else could have brought about that kind of realism and texture to the surrealistic lines given to her. Or think of her reticent regality in The Favourite, her mysterious silences in The Lost Daughter, her passive-aggressive demeanour in Fleabag. Colman knows her characters well enough to make them seem like people that could exist, even if you have never met someone like that.

JAKE GYLLENHAAL

Jake Gyllenhaal's ability to become any character is kind of terrifying to me. The man is practically shape-shifting. Everything about him changes the gaze, or the walk, or the smile he has in Zodiac is not the same as the one he has in Nightcrawler. What he is in Nightcrawler does not carry even a sliver of who he was in Donnie Darko. If you think about it, you would find that he has rarely ever played rhe same character twice. He places himself within the film with such comfort that it feels like none of the films he has starred in could have been made without him.