10 Actors Who Had Tremendous Breakthroughs In 2015

One of the joys of looking back over the film year is recognizing the actors that deservedly broke through to mainstream attention or announced themselves in career-making roles. 2015 was full of great performances, but what's surprising is how so many of those were delivered by relative newcomers, promising actors at last given prominent roles, and total debutantes. As the end of 2015 draws near, and a new year approaches with a bunch of new breakthrough artists, there's no better time to reflect on what a year it's been for fresh talent making a mark. Here, then, are the ten best breakthrough actors of 2015. 10) Rebecca Ferguson - Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation Rebecca Ferguson was no stranger to the small screen before this year, making waves in Scandinavian television as early as 1999, before breaking out in British TV in The White Queen in 2013. But undoubtedly her breakout cinematic moment came in Mission Impossible 5. The reason she stands out, even amongst that film's gallery of stars? How about the fact that she kicks arse so hard that she looks as though she could teach the plane-riding, skyscraper-scaling Tom Cruise a thing or two? MI5's Ilsa Faust isn't written with any particular complexity - on the page, she's designed as Ethan Hunt's female match and little more. Credit to Ferguson for hinting at such an inner life then and for making the character so much more bright and captivating than the script would have it. That Ferguson will return for MI6, the first Mission Impossible film to feature a recurring female character, tells you everything you need to know. 9) Jacob Tremblay - Room Imagine what it must take to convincingly portray the sense of wonder, fear and excitement felt by someone literally discovering the world for the first time, five years already into a life. Imagine making the apprehension and anxiousness of such a character appear instinctive. That's the feat that Jacob Tremblay pulls off in Room, aged just eight. As Jack, the boy kept isolated inside a tiny room along with his mother since birth, Tremblay gives an almost feral performance, portraying someone made reticent and anxious by a world he sees as perplexingly large and complex. Director Lenny Abrahamson has form in drawing out great performances, but if Tremblay only half-delivers on the promise he shows in Room, he's set to have a long career. 8) O'Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell - Straight Outta Compton It's impossible to single out just one of the newbie trio that leads the hip-hop bio Straight Outta Compton, so, y'know, why not just single out them all? They come as a package in the film anyway, playing off one another and making a compelling central unit by utilizing each of their individual strengths. The three are Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell and O'Shea Jackson, Jr. (playing his father Ice Cube in a meta bit of casting). They're not just fantastic mimics of the figures they're playing - each of these guys has a moment to display his dramatic prowess, whether it's Jackson as Ice Cube smashing up his manager's office after being denied a proper share of royalties, Hawkins as Dr Dre breaking down at his brother's funeral, or Mitchell as Eazy-E crying in desperation after being told he's got just months left to live. Still, they're best all together, so much so that they're going to find it difficult to find the same chemistry apart. 7) Olivia Cooke And Thomas Mann - Me And Earl And The Dying Girl Another cheat, but you really can't pick the Me from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and not have the Dying Girl in there too. While RJ Cyler does fine work as Earl, it's Thomas Mann and Olivia Cooke who are absolutely put through the wringer in Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's movie, an indie heartbreaker that asks more of its young stars than these Sundance darlings typically dare to. Mann is the geeky, awkward teen; Cooke is his slightly 'kooky', unpredictable crush. Only the pair make their characters more alive than that, like anything but indie caricatures. They make Greg and Rachel into complex souls attempting to navigate inconceivably difficult territory with humor, even as the reasons to be optimistic dwindle. Prepare yourself for the final 20 minutes of the movie, during which Cooke and Mann will have you pretending you have something in your eye throughout. 6) Abraham Attah - Beasts Of No Nation There aren't many filmmakers who'd have the courage to build their entire movie around a child actor, much less an untrained newcomer who's just entered his teens. But Cary Fukunaga, he of the True Detective season one, episode four tracking shot, is no shrinking violet; for his third feature, the director chose to adapt Uzodinma Iweala's harrowing Beasts of No Nation and cast just such a child actor in the lead. Luckily for Fukunaga, Abraham Attah is an incredible find, a match for any seasoned pro in Fukunaga's adap of Beasts. As Agu, the boy taken from his unnamed West African home and made a child soldier by a ferocious warlord (Idris Elba, in another great performance), Attah runs the gamut of cinematic emotion and leaves a powerful, haunting impression. 5) John Boyega - Star Wars: The Force Awakens Sure, we've seen John Boyega before, in Joe Cornish's Attack the Block, but it was difficult with that film to select just one actor out of the ensemble. In The Force Awakens, Boyega's strongly tested as a lead - or at least co-lead - for the first time. And lo and behold, he has the comic timing of a veteran comedian and the presence of a star who's been doing this for much, much longer. At just 23, Boyega carries the biggest franchise of all time on his shoulders, alongside Daisy Ridley (more on her in a moment), bringing heart and a kind of everyman quality until now unseen in the series. Finn is whiny and a little bit cowardly, but Boyega sells that as mere human foibles, playing Finn as the relatable anchor in a line-up of extraordinary characters. 4) Daisy Ridley - Star Wars: The Force Awakens Boyega had at least shown before how capable he could be in a feature. Totally unproven in Episode VII is Daisy Ridley, her first time in a feature film taking the movie's other co-lead spot (her and Boyega complement one another beautifully). Unlike Boyega, though, Ridley doesn't act like a pro - her power is located in the fact that she still seems plucked from obscurity. Where Boyega's instantly confident, Ridley's a rough diamond, with an unpredictability and a freshness you hardly ever see from actors at the movies, and not ever from leads in films as big as the new Star Wars movie. Ridley's the big revelation in a revelatory cast (who knew Adam Driver could do villainy? Who knew Oscar Isaac could play the matinee idol?), and stardom inevitably beckons. 3) Emory Cohen - Brooklyn Emory Cohen shouldn't really be considered a newcomer when he did such stellar work in The Place Beyond the Pines two years ago. But considering critics were surprisingly (and unfairly) cool on the film and audiences hardly took to it, it's been up to this year's immigrant drama Brooklyn to reveal Cohen as one to watch. Unsurprisingly, after Pines, Cohen is excellent. As the Italian-American sweetheart to Saoirse Ronan's Irish girl in New York, Cohen couldn't be more different from his arrogant, swaggering AJ in Pines. Here he's just a simple guy, a plucky plumber looking to his eight-year-old brother for advice on writing letters to his new girlfriend, one with a deep desire to care and provide for Ronan's Eilis. You feel him as the heart of Brooklyn, even during a third-act he largely spends off-screen. 2) Katherine Waterston - Inherent Vice, Steve Jobs Yes, Inherent Vice arrived in the US at the very end of last year (before going wide in January this year), but we in the UK didn't get PT Anderson's hippy noir until the beginning of 2015 - meaning we had the added luxury of seeing former unknown Katherine Waterston breaking out via two wildly different performances in the same year. In Vice, Waterston is a sexy vamp, the seductress that draws Joaquin Phoenix's baked private eye into a web of corruption and murder. In Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs, Waterston is a brittle (and vaguely irritating) woman-on-the-edge as the titular icon's former lover. And she's utterly convincing as both. Waterston, through just two performances, displays a range that should see her explode in the next few years. 1) Mark Rylance - Bridge of Spies, The Gunman, Wolf Hall It almost seems odd to suggest Mark Rylance is any kind of 'breakthrough' actor. At 55, he's been a theater giant for years, and has been making occasional appearances in movies since the 80s (albeit in supporting roles and bit-parts in indies). Regardless, 2015 was most likely the year this guy, so admired by the likes of Al Pacino and Sean Penn, actually appeared on your radar. It feels like Rylance has come out of nowhere to deliver one of the best-reviewed performances of the year, in Bridge of Spies, but he has in fact been honing his skill on the stage over decades. Spies, in which Rylance is the warm moral core, and TV's Wolf Hall, in which he's quietly calculating, are the highlight's of the actor's year, but even in the schlocky The Gunman, Rylance's ability to burn up the screen is intact. Next up is Spielberg's The BFG and Chris Nolan's Dunkirk movie; after years shying away from mainstream cinema, Rylance is here to stay.