9 Bad Actors Who Have Recently Given Oscar Worthy Performances

3) Hugh Grant – Cloud Atlas

It’s evidently not easy to pull off a dual role, though many actors have attempted it. There are even some heroic thesps out there who have tried to take on multiple roles in single movies, despite the best efforts of Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy selfishly trying to ruin the appeal of that approach.

In Cloud Atlas, Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis’ mind-frazzlingly ambitious sci-fi whatsit, multiple actors take on multiple roles across multiple timelines and multiple settings, to the point where you’re mainly just playing the game of trying to figure out which actor’s playing what character.

Without question the most successful cast member, Hugh Grant is so good in Cloud Atlas that he makes it look like hopping seamlessly from 19th-century American slaver, to British pensioner, to cannibalistic chieftain is easy.

As with comedy, science fiction is a hard sell for Oscar voters – Cloud Atlas got nothing from the Academy, but that doesn’t mean Grant wasn’t a revelation in it. Often painted as someone who can only play a stiff-upper-lip Englishman, in this one movie Grant reveals more range than he has in his entire career.