In a video game, the character select screen is where everything begins. You choose who you want to be and that choice defines the entire experience. Hollywood has its own version and the actors on it can become absolutely anything.
Versatility is the rarest skill in the entertainment industry. Anyone can be good in the right role. The actors on this list are good in every role and genuinely surprising in most of them.
Cate Blanchett, the player who breaks the character limit
Cate Blanchett has received eight Academy Award nominations across more than three decades. She won Best Supporting Actress for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator in 2004 and Best Actress for Blue Jasmine in 2013. Her 2023 Tár nomination, playing a world-renowned conductor brought down by misconduct allegations, was widely considered her finest performance.
In 2007 she received an Oscar nomination for playing a fictionalized male version of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. Her 2024 Apple TV Plus miniseries Disclaimer was directed by Alfonso Cuarón and co-starred Sacha Baron Cohen and Kevin Kline. Empire magazine’s 2022 readers’ poll named Blanchett one of the fifty greatest actors of all time.
Paul Mescal, the quiet Irishman who keeps shocking everyone
Paul Mescal won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor for Normal People in 2020 and received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for Aftersun in 2022. The New York Times called Aftersun “astonishing and devastating” and it topped Sight and Sound’s list of the fifty best films of that year. He then starred in All of Us Strangers in 2023 and led Gladiator II in 2024, which grossed 460 million dollars worldwide.
In 2025 he played William Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, which won the People’s Choice Award at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival. He has been cast as Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’ four-part Beatles biopic, with the first film scheduled for April 2028. Mescal has moved from Irish TV drama to Roman epic to Shakespeare without ever seeming like the same actor twice.
Florence Pugh, the actor who never plays it safe
Florence Pugh received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Little Women in 2019 and starred in Ari Aster’s horror film Midsommar the same year. Critics noted the two roles in a single calendar year represented a genuinely rare display of range for any actor. She appeared in Oppenheimer in 2023, Dune: Part Two in 2024, and performed her own stunt jump from a Malaysian skyscraper in Marvel’s Thunderbolts in 2025.
She has been confirmed for Dune: Part Three alongside Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. Denis Villeneuve has said her casting in Dune was among the easiest creative decisions he has ever made. Pugh has worked with Ari Aster, Greta Gerwig, Christopher Nolan, and Denis Villeneuve all before her thirtieth birthday.
Timothée Chalamet, the actor who studied then disappeared
Timothée Chalamet received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor at age twenty-two for Call Me By Your Name in 2018, becoming the third-youngest Best Actor nominee in Oscar history. He played Paul Atreides across two Dune films, portrayed Willy Wonka in 2023 in a film that grossed over 632 million dollars worldwide, and each role required a completely different physicality. He spent five years preparing to play Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, released December 25 2024, learning guitar and harmonica from scratch.
He personally performed 40 of Dylan’s songs in the film and Bob Dylan himself endorsed the performance before the film opened. He won the SAG Award for Best Actor and received Oscar, BAFTA, and Golden Globe nominations for the role. Chalamet has played a science fiction messiah, a chocolate factory heir, and a folk rock legend in three consecutive years.
Zendaya, the star who makes every director a better filmmaker
Zendaya won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Euphoria in both 2020 and 2022, becoming the youngest two-time Emmy winner in history. She starred in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune in 2021 and Dune: Part Two in 2024, shifting from a distant figure in the first film to the emotional center of the second. Villeneuve said that transformation was one of the key reasons Dune: Part Two works as a complete film.
Her performance in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers in 2024 earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama. A24 announced her third collaboration with the studio in 2025, a Ronnie Spector biopic directed by Barry Jenkins. Zendaya has built a body of work across superhero films, prestige TV, science fiction, and indie drama that almost no other actor her age has matched.
Austin Butler, the method actor who does not repeat himself
Austin Butler spent two years working with dialect coaches, vocal trainers, and choreographers to play Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, released June 2022. The performance earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor at the 95th ceremony in March 2023 and a BAFTA win for Best Actor in a Leading Role. He then played the villain Feyd-Rautha in Dune: Part Two in 2024 in a performance critics called physically unsettling and unlike anything he had previously done.
Director Denis Villeneuve said he worked with Butler on the character’s physicality as if choreographing a dancer. Butler told Variety the experience of working opposite Chalamet and Zendaya felt like performing live theater in front of his favorite actors in the world. He went from a two-year Elvis immersion to a science fiction villain in a single career step that no one predicted.
Saoirse Ronan, the actor who has been great since childhood
Saoirse Ronan received her first Academy Award nomination at age thirteen for Atonement in 2007. She has since received three additional Oscar nominations for Brooklyn, Lady Bird, and Little Women, making her the second-youngest person in history to receive four Academy Award nominations, behind only Jennifer Lawrence who was approximately four months younger at the time. She played characters across historical drama, modern romance, coming-of-age stories, and literary adaptation across all four performances.
She starred alongside Paul Mescal in the sci-fi drama Foe in 2023 and has been a close creative collaborator with Greta Gerwig since Lady Bird in 2017. Gerwig has publicly called Ronan her primary filmmaking partner and the two have discussed multiple future projects together. Ronan moves between periods, genres, and emotional registers without ever feeling like a different actor in any of them.
Barry Keoghan, the wildcard who owns every room he enters
Barry Keoghan won the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Banshees of Inisherin in 2023, playing a lonely overlooked young man on a remote Irish island. That same year he played the predatory and deeply unsettling Oliver Quick in Saltburn, a performance that generated enormous conversation online and split critics and audiences down the middle. The two characters share almost nothing in motivation, behavior, or emotional register.
He appeared in Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” music video in June 2024, which accumulated over 100 million YouTube views within weeks of release. He has been cast in a major role in the MCU’s Captain America: Brave New World and connected films. Keoghan is the rare actor who can play heartbreaking vulnerability and cold menace in the same calendar year and make both feel completely inevitable.
Andrew Scott, the theater-trained actor who never stops surprising
Andrew Scott became known to mainstream audiences as Moriarty in the BBC series Sherlock, which premiered in 2010, but his career moved in directions almost no one predicted from that role. He starred in HBO’s Ripley in 2024, playing the title character across all eight episodes directed entirely by Steven Zaillian, and learned to paint and draw for the role. The series received widespread critical acclaim and earned him a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination.
He starred opposite Paul Mescal in All of Us Strangers in 2023, a performance The Hollywood Reporter described as exhibiting warm and sexy chemistry with his co-star. He has also performed a one-person Hamlet show that toured internationally to critical praise. Scott’s career follows no visible pattern except the consistent pursuit of material that genuinely frightens and challenges him.
Mikey Madison, from supporting roles to Cannes in five years
Mikey Madison built her early career through television and supporting film roles, including appearances in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and the 2022 Scream film. Her career changed dramatically after filmmaker Sean Baker cast her as the lead in Anora. Baker had been impressed by her work in both films and offered her the role without an audition, later developing the character specifically with Madison in mind.
Anora premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize. Madison’s performance went on to earn major awards-season recognition. She won Best Lead Performance at the Independent Spirit Awards, Best Actress at the BAFTAs, and the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 97th Oscars in March 2025. She also received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination.
Made for a reported budget of approximately $6 million, Anora ultimately earned about $57 million worldwide. The film’s critical, awards, and commercial success transformed Madison from a supporting performer into an Oscar-winning leading actress in only a few years.
Featured Image: By Jay Dixit / WikiPortraits, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=176918058
