20 Unknown Actors Who Held Their Own Against A-Listers
“Sometimes, a main character does a scene that is above and beyond, but it only works because the person they are interacting with is selling it with their reactions,” Redditor DoesntUnderstands once explained to r/Movies. “If the person they are interacting with was a bad actor and doesn’t reciprocate the same level of effort, then it makes the main actor look hammy or over dramatic.”
Likewise, the opposite can be true: If they’re over-the-top, it seems like they’re making fun of them. And that’s what we’re for, dammit.
However, sometimes a bit player can strike just the right chord so well that they rise to the level of actors theoretically way beyond them. “For example, the dairy farmer from Inglourious Basterds,” u/DoesntUnderstands continued. They then asked, “What relatively unknown actor played a scene across from an A-list actor and really sold the performance?”
Their fellow Redditors certainly had no shortage of answers.
Nathan Fillion in ‘Saving Private Ryan’
Gene Jones in ‘No Country for Old Men’
Riz Ahmed in ‘Nightcrawler’
Michael Clarke Duncan in ‘The Green Mile’
Anne Heche in ‘Wag the Dog’
Abigail Breslin in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’
Jason Schwartzman in ‘Rushmore’
Natalie Portman in ‘Léon: The Professional’
Emily Blunt in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’
Hailee Steinfeld in ‘True Grit’
Dafne Keen in ‘Logan’
Justin Henry in ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’
Louise Fletcher in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’
Maria Bakalova in ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’
Edward Norton in ‘Primal Fear’
Paul Dano in ‘There Will Be Blood’
Roger Bart in ‘American Gangster’
Julia Butters in ‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’
Kirsten Dunst in ‘Interview With the Vampire’
James Gandolfini in ‘True Romance’
