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The 20 Best Breakout Performances of 2020

These unforgettable performances from newcomers illuminate the myriad ways there are to leave an indelible impact on cinema.
Breakout Performances
By  · Published on December 27th, 2020

Kingsley Ben-Adir and Eli Goree (One Night in Miami)

One Night In Miami Eli Goree Kingsley Ben Adir breakout performances 2020

It makes sense that two of the year’s most impressive breakout performances would come by way of an actor’s movie. One Night in Miami is just that, both in the sense that it’s helmed by Oscar-winning actor-turned-director Regina King, and because it demands unwaveringly rich and nuanced performances from its quartet of central cast-members. Familiar faces Aldis Hodge and Leslie Odom, Jr. play Jim Brown and Sam Cooke, respectively, while the lesser-known Kingsley Ben-Adir (as Malcolm X) and Eli Goree (playing Cassius Clay, as Muhammad Ali was then known) match their co-stars with star-making turns.

Adapted from his own play, One Night in Miami screenwriter Kemp Powers imagines the meaty conversations that might have taken place during the real-life gathering of the four icons in a Florida motel on the historic 1964 night Clay first became the heavyweight champion of the world. As with their cast-mates, Ben-Adir and Goree’s performances as Malcolm and Cassius transcend tribute acts; they take their characters to places we’re not used to seeing them in.

Goree nails the boxer’s musical cadence, dancerly physicality, tongue-in-cheek humor, and his famous bravado, but there are unexpected dimensions and depths to his work, too. Powers’ script suggests that the new world champion was struggling with doubts about his forthcoming conversion to Islam, and Goree weaves a sense of eleventh-hour vulnerability — something Cassius wasn’t known for — into his performance.

Playing Cassius’ spiritual advisor, Ben-Adir is Goree’s frequent scene-partner, though he’s also a key figure in Sam Cooke’s arc here. If anyone in the ensemble feels like One Night in Miami’s lead, then, it’s Ben-Adir, whose character stokes many of the rich debates that drive the film. There’s a smart blend of authority and anxiety in his performance: while Malcolm is assertive and persuasive in his exchanges with the rest of the ensemble, there’s a premonitory air of the hunted about him, too. Disillusioned with the Nation of Islam as led by Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm is undergoing a crisis of faith even as he tries to persuade Cassius to join him. He can sense trouble ahead. Like Goree, Ben-Adir doesn’t just traffic in the legacy star power of his real-life counterpart but gifts us fresh emotional insight into the conflicted psyche of an icon.

These are formidable roles to play — not least because Denzel Washington and Will Smith set such hard acts to follow in past portrayals — but both Ben-Adir and Goree surpass the challenges set for them and stamp their own signatures on the cinematic legacy of these icons.


Lyna Khoudri (Papicha)

Lyna Khoudri Papicha breakout performances 2020

It’s easy to see why Lyna Khoudri’s leading performance in Papicha won her the Most Promising Actress award at this year’s Césars (France’s “Oscars”). As Nedjma, an eighteen-year-old fashion fanatic who refuses to buckle under mounting anti-feminist oppression in ‘90s Algeria, Khoudri gives a firebrand performance, as full of life and political conviction as her character is.

The role had personal significance: Algerian-born Khoudri moved to France after her journalist father became the target of death threats during that same period in Algeria’s history when armed Islamist groups went to war with the government for control of the country. You get the feeling that personal connection inspired her work here: Khoudri is fully connected to the role, emotionally speaking, channelling a nuanced medley of rage, defiance and grief in her portrayal of a young woman forced to confront yet another pivotal point in the country’s fraught history.

What’s particularly remarkable about Nedjma is that she picks fight over flight in this face-off, despite the very real threat of retaliatory violence and even death. The tender grace notes in Khoudri’s work explain her character’s resilience in this regard: she feels intrinsically bound to Algeria’s soil and its people — including the dorm-mates she loves like sisters and the real mother and sister who make up her lovingly supportive home — and so she’d rather die than stand back and see all that destroyed. With this rousing, sensitive performance, she draws an intelligent alternative case for nationalism, and also marks herself out as an international revelation.

What’s next: The French Dispatch


Orion Lee (First Cow)

Orion Lee First Cow breakout performances 2020

As a warm portrait of the tender bonds that grow between strangers, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is a quietly powerful corrective to the idea that life in the Old West was all greed and lonely individualism. As King-Lu and Cookie, the unlikely duo at the film’s center, Orion Lee and John Magaro are central to that effect. Their bond feels cosmically ordained, both in its accidental beginnings — Magaro’s Cookie stumbles upon a freezing, naked King-Lu (Lee) while foraging for mushrooms in the Oregon forest — and in the depth of their instantaneous rapport.

Although they’re both gentle-spoken misfits, Cookie and King-Lu are, in at least one way, opposites. The former is anxious and unsure, making him an easy target for bullying by the gruff trappers he travels with, while Lee’s character is a go-getter whose self-assuredness and kind nature has a pacifying effect on his friend’s nerves. It’s an effect Lee’s performance extends to the whole film: like Cookie, we can’t help but submit to his soothing authority.

From the softness in the way he says “Cookie” to King-Lu’s grander gestures of friendship, Lee is an exceptionally warm presence who authoritatively subverts the film’s cutthroat context. That he can pull off such a feat while working in Reichardt’s signature low-key register indicates the arrival of a profoundly sensitive performer to our midst.

What’s next: Cassette


Helena Zengel (System Crasher)

Helena Zengel System Crasher breakout performances 2020

One of the most arresting breakthrough performances of the year comes by way of System Crasher, a raw, documentary-style portrait of a nine-year-old so troubled that the German social care system doesn’t know what to do with her. As Benni, Helena Zengel is a force of nature: wild and seemingly untameable. Despite her slight build (she was just nine at the time of filming), Zengel weaponizes her physicality with such a fierceness that we never question whether such a little girl really could smash the “shatterproof” windows that adorn the many institutions she’s expelled from.

What’s more, Zengel is as unpredictable and inexhaustible as the film’s frenzied score: her character is wont to lash out at vulnerable targets entirely unprovoked, and so every time a baby or an animal shares the screen with her, we hold our breath. She’s at least as terrifying as any horror movie child; arguably more so, given the film’s documentary realist aesthetic.

But what makes her performance even more impressive is the sense of piercing vulnerability and resilience she brings to Benni. Traumatized as a result of early childhood abuse, it becomes clear that her character’s erratic behavior is merely the flip side of a deep need to be loved, particularly by the troubled mother who repeatedly surrenders her to social services. As much as she can inspire fear, then, Zengel can also wring tears out of us, particularly in the seconds between her character receiving yet more bad news and lashing out in retaliation, when we watch her quietly absorb another painful rejection.

Remarkably, Benni never yields to the depression that you’d expect to follow so many abandonments; while it’s clear that the system views her as a no-hoper, Benni herself doesn’t, and Zengel radiates a convincing sense of buoyancy to this effect. It all adds up to an astonishingly commanding performance of great diversity — one that (together with her performance as another traumatized child in News of the World) announces the prodigal Zengel as one of cinema’s best young discoveries.

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Farah Cheded is a Senior Contributor at Film School Rejects. Outside of FSR, she can be found having epiphanies about Martin Scorsese movies here and reviewing Columbo episodes here.