The 20 Best Breakthrough Performances Of 2016

We’re well and truly into December now, which means it’s time to dive into our year-end coverage for real after wetting our feet last week with Best Trailers and Best Posters. First up, since it seems like a fresh-faced and optimistic way to start our look at the year now ending, and after the forward-looking megafeature 100 Most Anticipated Films of 2017 yesterday, is our list of the 20 Best Breakthrough Performances of this year in film.

READ MORE: 20 Best Breakthrough Performances Of 2015

Every year, a new crop of actors show up in films of all sizes and grab a slice of our attention disproportionate to how well we’d known them before. Of course, for every one of these, whether they’re newcomers or established veterans who just suddenly happened on a certain alchemical role, there are thousands more still plugging away in the trenches. But the film industry has always been a dream factory, especially for aspiring thespians, and the stories of sudden breakouts that inspire them might be rare, but they sure are compelling. Here are our 20 favorite such stories from 2016.

Click here for our complete coverage of the Best of 2016

Abbey Lee as Sarah in “The Neon Demon”
Lee appeared in our honorable mentions in last year’s edition of this list for her small turn in “Mad Max: Fury Road.” But while her role in Nicolas Winding Refn‘s high-sheen, low-IQ satire might not actually afford her much more screen time, she makes the absolute most of it, delivering the closest the film gets to a rounded performance outside of and arguably including Elle Fanning‘s central ingenue. Styled to fembot perfection, she seems at first one half of a matching pair with Bella Heathcote‘s Gigi (also good value). But as the film wears on, we see both the insecurity and the corrosive rot that has begun to set in underneath her perfect exterior, and whatever insights about the fashion world the film has to offer are contained in Lee’s faltering expression during the audition scene. But she also delivers one of the most fetishizable performance moments of the year —it’s not even when she eats that eyeball. It’s right afterwards, when the tiniest, animalistic snarl twitches her perfect lips, as though her last flicker of humanity has just been snuffed out, starved to death inside the beauty ideal like it was a sarcophagus.

Trevante Rhodes as Black in “Moonlight”
If there was ever going to be any heartache on this list, it was going to concern Barry Jenkins‘ sublime “Moonlight,” which not only features an incredible ensemble, but has three relative rookie performers playing the same character at different phases of his life. This isn’t just a couple of flashback scenes either: each of the three (Alex R. Hibbert playing “Little” and Ashton Sanders as “Chiron”) is given a distinct segment, with each having some heavy emotional lifting to do. But forced to narrow it down, we’re going to opt for Rhodes’ amazing turn, in part because it falls to him to contain and subtly assimilate the performances of the younger versions, which surely must have been more difficult because he actually bears little physical resemblance to either. At first, it seems like that dissimilarity might be a stumbling block, but piece by piece, it feels like the bulked-up ex-con version of the watchful, skinny boy is dismantled before our eyes. And it culminates in possibly the purest acting moment of the year —it’s the kitchen scene in which, in one simple moment, we’d swear we can actually see those other versions of Black revealed in Rhodes’ heartbreakingly hesitant expression.

Lily Gladstone as Jamie The Rancher in “Certain Women”
This typically austere but deeply resonant triptych film recently became the first Kelly Reichardt movie to make $1 million at the box office. For that, we can presumably thank the clout of the top-billed Kristen Stewart. But her role, though played with her trademark banked-down burn, is smaller in her segment than that of rising Native American actress Gladstone, whose portrayal of the lonely ranch hand who becomes inarticulately fixated on Stewart’s worldly Elizabeth gives the chapter, and possibly the film as a whole, its most moving beats. It’s a necessarily unprepossessing role, with the stolid Jamie living a life so lacking in glamor —mucking out stables in gray, disinterested winter weather on an isolated farm— that out-of-town aspiring lawyer Elizabeth could seem like such an exotic and alluring creature. And yet there is something tremendously warm and willing in Gladstone’s beautifully underplayed turn, which makes that gut punch scene of her driving away after her inevitable rejection carry such weight. She could easily have seemed too downtrodden to relate to, but Gladstone’s sure, quiet performance turns her from pathetic to empathetic without ever searching for our pity.

Lucas Hedges as Patrick in “Manchester By The Sea”
Kenneth Lonergan is a truly sensitive writer and director of actors, and thus has a history of getting revelatory performances from young stars in roles about complex parental relationships that’s as long as his (admittedly not very long) directorial career: from Rory Culkin‘s supporting turn in “You Can Count On Me” to Anna Paquin‘s astonishing performance in “Margaret.” In “Manchester By The Sea,” the honor goes to Lucas Hedges in the role of the recently bereaved Patrick, who is unexpectedly placed under the guardianship of his emotionally paralyzed uncle after the death of his father. The film is so wincingly wise about its central relationships that the acting (which is inspired across the board) feels naturalistic to the point of transparent, and in this most undemonstrative of films, Hedges has probably the least showy role of all. And yet his beautiful turn is crucial to the movie’s deep cut, with Patrick’s careful grief for his father —the kind you know he will rebound from as he matures— providing acute counterpoint to his uncle, a man who has grown twisted around his guilt and loss like an old tree. A beguiling mix of teen playa and compassionate but independent young-adult, Hedges’ performance finds and inhabits all Patrick’s bright and dark corners.

Royalty Hightower as Toni in “The Fits”
Anna Rose Holmer’s Sundance sensation “The Fits” is one of the most original and striking feature debuts in years —it’s the story of a young dance troupe in Cincinnati overtaken by a wave of possibly hysterical fits. But as accomplished as the film is, it’s hard to imagine it working as well as it does without the remarkable debut performance from the excellently-named Royalty Hightower. Just eleven years old when the film was made and discovered thanks to YouTube videos of the Q-Kidz dance troupe she belongs to, and who also feature in the film, Hightower has a quiet but utterly magnetic charisma that suggests she was born to be a movie star. It’s an immensely physical turn, both due to the dance element and otherwise, but the young actress also excels at showing, even amidst a certain confidence, an uneasiness in her own skin and a desire to fit in that makes it one of the best portraits of pre-teenagedom in a long while. And people are catching on fast: she won a special award for Breakthrough Performance from the National Board of Review, and will star alongside Laurence Fishburne in the upcoming “Ruby In Murdertown.”