Austin Butler’s performance in Elvis was by most critical accounts extraordinary. He inhabited Elvis Presley across the full arc of the singer’s life — the young performer finding his voice in 1950s Memphis, the explosive superstar of the stadium years, the bloated and isolated figure of the Vegas decline — and he did so with a physical and vocal commitment that verged on total transformation. He had won the BAFTA. He had won the Golden Globe. He was the frontrunner by the conventional measures.
Colin Farrell’s performance in The Banshees of Inisherin was arguably the most technically nuanced work of his career. The film, Martin McDonagh’s meditation on the end of friendship and the small violences that define community, asked Farrell to make a character who might have been a figure of comedy or derision fully human and fully tragic. He succeeded in ways that made the performance simultaneously funny and devastating.
Paul Mescal’s performance in Aftersun was the most formally demanding of the nominees — a quiet film in which what is happening psychologically is almost entirely subtext, and where the gap between the visible and the actual must be carried by the actor in every scene. Mescal, in his first major film role, sustained that gap across a feature-length film without breaking it once.
Bill Nighy’s performance in Living was the most classical of the five — an adaptation of Kurosawa’s Ikiru, about a bureaucrat who learns he is dying and decides to actually live his remaining time. Nighy brought to the role a precision and restraint that the film’s British register demanded, and the result was one of the most moving performances in his career.