The Top 12 Breakthrough Actors Of 2014

Ellar Coltrane (Boyhood)

Richard Linklater’s 12-year opus will be remembered as one of 2014’s greatest treasures. The critic and audience darling – and possible Best Picture winner – may not have received the same admiration, though, if Linklater had picked another six-year-old boy to play Mason, whose life literally sprouts before our eyes over 165 minutes.

Linklater has said that he wanted to choose a boy for the film that was not chatty or hyperactive, and so he picked the quieter Ellar Coltrane, an actor with some commercial experience who brought a gentle, giddy naturalism to his earlier scenes and a sensitive introspection during Mason’s teenage years. Coltrane does not mug or act out, and many of his early scenes contain sparse dialogue, as we watch him observe and interact with moving out, an annoying sister and a new family situation with grace. For the latter years of adolescent angst, the actor even wrote some of the scenes, deriving them from life experience – a move that makes the heartbreak his character faces even more realized.

Coltrane never calls attention to his performance, an astonishing feat for a pint-sized, first-time actor. His performance is so authentic that one could be fooled to imagine that his story was actually Mason’s. In fact, a few of my friends had believed that Boyhood was closer to a documentary.