The busiest actors of 2020

This might’ve been the most impressive year of Elisabeth Moss’s career, which is saying more than a little something. She was harrowingly believable as the victim of a terrifying gaslighting effort in James Wan’s clever reimagining of “The Invisible Man”, and spellbinding as a self-destructively brilliant author in “Shirley”. As those films were hitting the big screen, Moss got back to work on television’s most relentlessly depressing drama, “The Handmaid’s Tale”. She’s due for a more mirthful 2021 with roles in Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” and Taika Waititi’s soccer comedy, “Next Goal Wins”.

No one’s living more deliciously than Anna Taylor-Joy! Five years after her breakthrough performance in “The Witch”, the young actor pretty much owned 2020 with roles ranging from effervescent (“Emma.”) to mesmerizing (“The Queen’s Gambit”) to “thank god that’s finally released and behind me” (“The New Mutants”). She also appeared in “Here Are the Young Men” and was set to add a fourth feature to her busy ’20 slate until the pandemic knocked Edgar Wright’s hotly-anticipated “Last Night in Soho” to 2021.

After generating buzz on the festival circuit five years ago with her appearance in Adam Egypt Mortimer’s “Some Kind of Hate”, Sierra McCormick finally arrived with memorable turns in Joe Begos’s rough-and-tumble “VFW” and Andrew Patterson’s eerily engrossing “The Vast of Night”. The latter film shows McCormick off to fine effect as a precocious young woman drawn to the town’s know-it-all radio DJ; he’s cocky and full of wise-seeming insights, but she quickly demonstrates that she’s every bit his intellectual equal.

Two movies hitting in the same year isn’t unusual, but the sheer amount of work required to Cohen’s second go-round as Borat shot and edited – in the middle of a pandemic – is massively impressive. While Cohen’s portrayal of Abbie Hoffman in “The Trial of the Chicago 7” deserves all the attention and plaudits it receives, that he managed to skip all over the U.S. and compile enough explosively funny material for a new Borat movie, despite most of the population knowing exactly who Borat is, boggles the mind.

This gifted Australian actor landed on the radar in 2018 via Sam Levinson’s wild “Assassination Nation”, and she appears to be on the cusp of stardom thanks to superb performances in Josephine Decker’s “Shirley” and the CBS All Access miniseries of “The Stand”. In the former, she’s a soon-to-be mother tasked with seeing to the abundant needs of troublemaking author Shirley Jackson; in the latter, she’s pregnant again, this time in the midst of a global pandemic that’s set the stage for an epic showdown between good and evil. Despite the surface similarities, the two roles couldn’t be more different, and Young handles them both with aplomb.

Thanks to “Seberg” getting delayed to 2020, we had the pleasure of hanging with Ms. Stewart three times this year. Though Benedict Andrews biopic of the “Breathless” star is disappointingly by-the-numbers, Stewart manages to find the spark that made Seberg so ineffably fascinating. In the sci-fi/horror lark “Underwater”, Stewart gets to play a Ripley-esque heroine who does battle with beasts on the ocean floor. And she’s immensely sympathetic in the otherwise dreadful “Happiest Season” as a young woman whose partner (Mackenzie Davis) has yet to come out to her conservative family.

The man who makes a movie on the way home from making a movie had a shockingly quiet 2020: according to IMDb, he appeared in only twenty-six films this year, down from thirty in 2019. You’re probably not going to see many (if any) of these movies (e.g. “Top Gunner”, “Asteroid-a-Geddon” and, um, “Free Lunch Express”), but, as ever, we salute the work ethic of the one-time Academy Award nominee.

The up-and-coming young actor had herself a very busy 2020. She turned in memorable performances in “Little Fires Everywhere” and Amazon’s Al Pacino-fronted Nazi-chasing drama “Hunters”. This Christmas, you’ll get to see her opposite George Clooney in the post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama “The Midnight Sky”. She was selected as one of Variety’s “Actors to Watch”, and we’re excited to see what she does next.

Five movies in one year is a lot for anyone not named Eric Roberts, but, as always with Mr. Adkins, it ain’t the number of films but the mileage. Thirty years ago, Adkins would’ve been challenging Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal for the hand-to-hand action star crown. Those films are now independently produced and shipped directly to streaming services; they might not have the production value of an “Above the Law” or “Timecop”, but Adkins isn’t sleepwalking through these movies. As a trained martial artist, he takes a serious licking on these productions.

Ms. Plaza’s 2020 might’ve looked a little busier on paper had two of her films not been bumped to 2021, but she leaves such an indelible impression in just about everything she makes that you feel like she’s busting her butt every year. She has a blast with the designated scene-stealer role in Clea DuVall’s family dramedy “Happiest Season”, but she’s making a ton of noise at the end of this year as a manipulative filmmaker in Lawrence Michael Levine’s “Black Bear”.

Jonathan Majors blew us away in 2019’s “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”, and he tripled-down on that promise this year with spectacular performances in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”, Max Winkler’s “Jungleland” and Misha Green’s horrific HBO series “Lovecraft Country”. He was recently tapped to play Kang the Conquerer in “Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”, and the smart money is on his character being the impetus for the next big Avengers throwdown.

The controversial SNL star has been providing tabloid fodder over the last few years with his edgy material and active love life, so it was nice to see the talented young man dig deep for “The King of Staten Island”, which is loosely based on his childhood as the son of a fallen fireman. He also top-lined Jason Orley’s coming-of-age comedy “Big Time Adolescence” and appeared in John Turtorro’s better-off-forgotten “The Big Lebowski” spinoff, “The Jesus Rolls”. He’s also set to appear in James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” as the enforcer Blackguard.

The further R-Patz gets from the “Twilight” series, the more people realize he’s one of the finest young actors working today. Pattinson got the showiest role in Christopher Nolan’s baffling Bond-ian mélange “Tenet”, and grabbed our attention with a bizarre hillbilly accent in Antonio Campos’s hard-to-take “The Devil All the Time”. We didn’t get around to “Waiting for the Barbarians”, but Pattinson stars in it and it came out in 2020, so that’s three movies! And yet the actor’s greatest achievement might’ve been surviving a bout with the coronavirus whilst shooting “The Batman”.

Aldis Hodge was stunning in last year’s criminally overlooked “Clemency”, but he couldn’t be denied in 2020 as NFL great Jim Brown in Regina King’s “One Night in Miami”. He was also excellent as a principled detective in James Wan’s “The Invisible Man”, and did something or other in Disney+’ “Magic Camp”. Now that Hodge is on Hollywood’s radar, we expect to see him landing roles commensurate with his tremendous talent.

The daughter of Genesis drummer Phil Collins enjoyed a particularly busy 2020 thanks primarily to her lead performance in the buzzy Netflix comedy series “Emily in Paris” from “Sex and the City” creator Darren Star. She was also delightfully no-nonsense as Herman Mankiewicz’s caretaker in “Mank” and held her own in Vaughn Stein’s thriller “Inheritance” alongside Simon Pegg and Connie Nielsen.

Alison Brie knocked out four movies in 2020, but we were left grieving for Netflix scrapping the planned fourth season of “Glow” due to the coronavirus. That aside, Brie was her typically industrious self, starring in Dave Franco’s horror flick “The Rental”, playing a hiss-able daddy’s girl in “Happiest Season”, co-starring in the ultra-buzzy “Promising Young Woman” and co-writing the Netflix drama “Horse Girl”.

Broadway star Leslie Odom, Jr. would’ve had a bigger year had the pandemic not shoved two of his projects into 2021. He was every bit as electric on people’s televisions as he was on stage as Aaron Burr in Disney+’ presentation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton”, and positively dazzling as Sam Cooke in Regina King’s “One Night in Miami”. Joanna Johnson’s topical Freeform rom-com, “Love in the Time of Corona”, didn’t catch fire, but Odom found time for that as well. We were supposed to see him this year in Sia’s musical “Music” and David Chase’s “The Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark”, but now those projects will help the actor build on the momentum of 2020.

America’s most beloved movie star had a more eventful 2020 than he probably would’ve liked. He was one of the first big celebrities to contract the coronavirus, which wound up forcing his World War II submarine drama, “Greyhound”, from theaters to Apple TV. His diagnosis held up the production of Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” (which co-stars Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker), but it couldn’t halt Netflix’s release of Paul Greengrass’s “News of the World”, a post-Civil War drama that could land Hanks his first Best Actor nomination since 2001’s “Cast Away”.

The son of “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” screenwriter Peter Hedges has been one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors since his breakthrough performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea”. Hedges probably would’ve had a Broadway show vying for his time in 2020, but with New York City theater shuttered indefinitely, we had to make do with two terrific performances in Steven Soderbergh’s “Let Them All Talk” and Azazel Jacobs’s “French Exit” (opposite an Oscar-worthy Michelle Pfeiffer).

The legend was once again inescapable with three projects in 2020. She’s the highlight of Ryan Murphy’s mostly tepid Netflix musical “The Prom” and a dynamo as a struggling, flight-phobic author in Steven Soderbergh’s “Let Them All Talk”. Streep also found time to record narration for “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth” and is ready to throw herself into Adam McKay’s star-studded disaster satire, “Don’t Look Up”.