20 Actors Who Just Gave Their Best Performance Ever
These actors just turned in their best ever work.
It's always tremendously satisfying to see actors well and truly one-up themselves with a performance that outshines everything else they've done in their career up to that point.
It's rare that it happens of course, because the majority of the roles an actor takes aren't going to be undeniable home runs, and there are also so many factors that go into a career-defining performance.
But when it happens, it can entirely change how an actor is perceived by both critics and general audiences alike, perhaps even changing the sorts of roles they get offered from this point forward.
Whatever the future holds for these 20 performers, though, each just showed up and gave what is surely their finest acting performance to date.
From young rising stars to decades-long veterans, these actors all proved they aren't resting on their laurels by topping their entire body of work with a recent performance.
And so, these actors are all proof perfect that nobody is above surprising us, whether giving a performance we never could've expected from them, or simply being even better than we already knew them to be...
20. Dwayne Johnson - The Smashing Machine
Though many joked that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson couldn't not give a career-topping performance in Benny Safdie's new sports drama The Smashing Machine considering how few genuinely dramatic roles he's taken to date, he still delivered a turn many didn't believe him capable of.
As embattled MMA fighter Mark Kerr, Johnson literally and figuratively transforms himself, donning makeup prosthetics to shed his popular countenance, while immersing himself in a character who pinballs from quiet reserve to explosive rage throughout the film's runtime.
It's Johnson like we've never seen him before, playing an extremely vulnerable and challenging character who isn't necessarily one audiences can easily connect or sympathise with.
Johnson has been widely lauded for his work here, enough that some believe he could even land himself an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
But even if he doesn't, it provides firm proof that he has far more to offer than generic action hero roles in swiftly forgotten blockbusters.
This won't be a one-off attempt to be taken seriously either, as Johnson is already set to star in a new Hawaii-set crime thriller to be directed by Martin Scorsese. What a world.