Performance is a kind of alchemy, so it’s rare that we get a controlled experiment that reveals how measurably it can swing a work of art. But that’s what happened this year, with the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl.” The show opened, in April—on Barbra Streisand’s birthday, no less—to middling reviews that put much of the blame on Beanie Feldstein, in the role of Fanny Brice. Not to harp on Feldstein, a likable actor who’s been good elsewhere, but she was vocally underpowered and, more crucially, lacked the one-in-a-million drive needed to make the show soar. When Fanny sings, “I’m the greatest star,” she’s got to mean it, and we’ve got to believe it. Feldstein left the show at the end of July, months earlier than planned, and was replaced by the “Glee” star Lea Michele, who seems to have been training to play Fanny since exiting the womb. Suddenly, the show had an engine of hunger—you believe that this woman would step over a corpse on her way to the spotlight—and turned from a flop to a hit.
Even without side-by-side comparisons, this year brought plenty of examples of how a great performance can bring a blurry image into focus, rewrite a story we thought we knew, or simply sizzle. What would “The Fabelmans” have been without the queasy exhibitionism of Michelle Williams, or the hammy chutzpah of Judd Hirsch? What would “Till” have been without the empowered grief of Danielle Deadwyler, as the mother of Emmett Till? In “Return to Seoul,” the first-time actor Park Ji-min made a brazen, unsettling turn as a chaotic adoptee. On Broadway, Victoria Clark, at sixty-three, gave a winsome sadness to a teen-age girl with a condition that prematurely ages her, in “Kimberly Akimbo,” and Gavin Creel turned Cinderella’s Prince in “Into the Woods”—usually played as a preening charmer—into an impeccable douchebag. On television, Aubrey Plaza and Meghann Fahy brought two sides of thirtysomething womanhood into delicious conflict in “The White Lotus,” and Sheryl Lee Ralph lit up “Abbott Elementary”—and the Emmy stage.
What follows is a completely subjective, utterly non-comprehensive (no cultural omnivore can consume it all) list of ten performances that stunned me, delighted me, and left an indelible mark on the culture in 2022.
The tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is nothing if not an enigma. (Seriously, what’s up with the voice?) But Seyfried, in Elizabeth Meriwether’s sharp and sly Hulu miniseries, brings a warped center to someone who has remained stubbornly impossible to read, even amid an avalanche of coverage tracing her rise and fall. How much is Holmes’s persona a self-invention, forged in the image of her idol, Steve Jobs? Did she even believe her utopian shtick? Capturing both her absurdity and her moral decay, Seyfried gives Holmes a starting point of vulnerability—especially during her time at Stanford, where she reported being raped—but also of hubris, quoting Yoda to a skeptical professor. As the series goes on, we see an increasingly desperate and icy Holmes retreat behind a wall of lies, and behind her calculated guise—until a brilliant final moment that snaps us back to the beginning.
No one but Yeoh could have anchored this martial-arts, sci-fi, multiverse immigrant comedy, from the directing duo Daniels. As Evelyn Wang, a weary Chinese American laundromat owner who discovers that her parallel selves include a teppanyaki chef, a woman with hot-dog fingers, and (wink, wink) a kung-fu movie star, Yeoh delivers the performance of her career: funny, heartfelt, kick-ass, and weird. After starting out in Hong Kong action movies, Yeoh became a crossover star in the United States, in such films as “Tomorrow Never Dies” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” In her fifties, she got a second wind, as the matriarch in “Crazy Rich Asians.” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” draws on her previous incarnations and mixes them up into something completely original. Yeoh not only is game for the movie’s tonal contortions but grounds them in recognizable human emotions: middle-aged disappointment, maternal frustration, and the thrill of opening your eyes to possibility.
“I want to talk about secrets,” Carmichael says, at the start of his riveting HBO standup special, addressing an intimate live audience from a folding chair. What follows is a carefully crafted confessional that pivots from his family’s history of infidelity to his own coming-out story, of which the special is a part. But he never pleads for the audience’s embrace: he simply unfurls himself and earns it. “Rothaniel” is directed by Bo Burnham, who has become an invaluable collaborator on other comedians’ projects (he also directed Kate Berlant in two excellent shows that appeared this year, one on Hulu and the other Off Broadway), and he wisely gives Carmichael room to breathe. During long, resonant pauses, Carmichael appears to collapse into himself, only to flash his seductive eyes and remind us who’s steering the ship. Like “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Rothaniel” is, in part, the story of a queer person’s search for connection with an uncomprehending parent, and I haven’t stopped thinking about Carmichael’s sudden gaze at the camera, daring his mother to love him as he is.
The actors in this retro-futurist thriller, on Apple TV+, have to bring to life an eerie, uncanny world in which even the characters are strangers to themselves: Lumon Industries, where select employees are “severed” between home and work selves, and the maze of antiseptic corporate hallways is home to mysterious baby goats. And yet the ensemble manages to work on the same weird wavelength, many of them playing two characters in one. How to single out any one actor? There’s Adam Scott, our severed hero; Patricia Arquette, as a middle-management stooge by day and a hippy-dippy cookie baker by night; Britt Lower, as the rebellious Helly R. and her very unlikely alter ego; Dichen Lachman, as the otherworldly wellness coach, Ms. Casey; and John Turturro and Christopher Walken, two actors I never imagined I’d be rooting for to get it on.
There’s a reason that the once renowned, later disgraced, completely fictitious conductor Lydia Tár is talked about like a real person, at least in certain Twitter circles. Actually, there are two reasons: Todd Field’s note-perfect screenplay and direction, and Blanchett’s transfixing performance as the woman herself, a classical-music luminary brought low. Blanchett’s superpower is her self-possession, which, in films such as “Blue Jasmine” and “Carol,” she has used to show what happens when high-status women are forced to find new strategies to survive. “Tár” features her in one of her best modes—toxic diva—but the character feels like an entirely new creation. Blanchett’s velvety voice, shrewd eyes, and domineering intelligence seduce us—until we come to realize that Tár’s unravelling is a long time coming. “Tár” may have opened in October, but it feels as if Lydia Tár has been here all along.
Ruben Östlund’s dark comedy, like “Tár,” upends social status—but for Abigail, the euphemistically titled “toilet manager” on a luxury yacht, there’s nowhere to go but up. De Leon, a Filipina actress in her overdue breakout role, doesn’t become a major player until the film’s Hobbesian third act, but once she arrives she’s a ferocious force. Her first big speech, at a campfire, is a surprise that leaves the audience gobsmacked and cheering, and her portrait of a custodian turning the tables on the well-heeled is full of blunt humor, carnality, and rage. Of the film’s many shocking twists, the most lingering may be de Leon’s ability to show up out of nowhere and walk away with the entire movie. For my money, she should be at the top of the Best Supporting Actress conversation.
Speaking of Oscars, can we please bump Mescal up the Best Actor list? The twenty-six-year-old Irish heartthrob is best known for “Normal People,” based on the Sally Rooney novel, but “Aftersun” did more than qualify him as a bona-fide movie star. The understated A24 drama, by the Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, follows a single father, Calum, and his eleven-year-old daughter, Sophie, on a resort vacation in Turkey, told through laconic, aching scenes that appear to be culled from Sophie’s adult memories. Something is broken in Calum, but we don’t know quite what. His fate seems grim, but we don’t know quite how. With so much left undefined and unsaid, Mescal fills in the gaps with feeling—he speaks volumes with a pained glance or a half-uttered sentence—and his scenes with the child actor Frankie Corio are naturalism at its finest.
During the pandemic, Stalter was one of a cadre of little-known comedians who went viral for low-tech, front-facing online videos. Among her most popular was “Hi, gay,” in which she plays a not-ready-for-prime-time butter-shop proprietor who is trying to capitalize on Pride Month. Stalter’s antic character studies landed her a role on HBO Max’s “Hacks”—her first professional acting job—as Kayla, a gloriously obnoxious, stunningly incompetent assistant to a talent manager, played by Paul W. Downs. Kayla, the daughter of the firm’s owner, is what the kids call a nepo baby, and Stalter plays her with such daffy exuberance that we love her despite (or because of) her blinkered privilege. In a series abounding with great performances, most notably Jean Smart’s (don’t worry, I put her on this list last year), Stalter still manages to steal scene after scene. All signs point to a Madeline Kahn-style loony-balloony character actress in the making.
Like Stalter, Slate hit her stride making online videos, only it was twelve years ago and she was playing a talking shell. Months after getting fired from “Saturday Night Live,” in 2010, Slate and her then boyfriend Dean Fleischer Camp released their first Marcel video on YouTube, which introduced the world to a tiny, googly-eyed shell with a piece of lint for a pet. The video, which currently has thirty-three million views, affectionately spoofs retro stop-motion specials, with Slate as Marcel’s warbly voice and guileless spirit. This summer, Slate and Camp (now collaborative ex-spouses) expanded Marcel’s adventures into an A24 movie, featuring the perfectly cast Isabella Rossellini as Marcel’s grandmother. The sight gags tickle (Marcel uses honey to walk up walls), but what makes this labor-of-love movie so winning is that Slate gives Marcel an expansive inner life, full of sweetness, fear, grief, and an ounce of sass.
Is this even a performance? Fielder’s uncategorizable HBO series is, of course, all about performance, as the comedian runs real people through simulated conditions meant to train them for the predicaments of life. But, as the show gets more tangled and perverse, it becomes clear that Fielder—or at least the affectless, confounded version of himself that he puts onscreen—is the show’s central curiosity. A scientist who weirds out his specimens isn’t observing them; they’re observing him, and so are we. At the end of its provocative first season, “The Rehearsal” turns its dead-eyed gaze on children, who are more enthusiastic but less convincing pretenders than adults, and Fielder reveals something like parental longing. Unless it’s all an act. In the hall of mirrors that is “The Rehearsal,” who can tell? ♦
