20 major stars whose careers took off at Sundance

Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Olsen, and Michael B. Jordan are all Sundance Breakthrough alumni

PublishedJanuary 21, 2022

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From left: Elizabeth Olsen (Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Best Events), Michael B. Jordan (Photo: Larry Busacca/Getty Images), and Jennifer Lawrence (Photo: Fred Hayes/Getty Images) at Sundance in 2012, 2013, and 2010, respectively

One of the go-to movie-nerd trivia flexes is to make sport of naming all of the much-hyped Sundance Film Festival titles that withered into obscurity once they were released into the real world: Grace Is Gone! The Myth Of Fingerprints! The Spitfire Grill, for god’s sake, The Spitfire Grill! But the truth is, Sundance has maintained an impressively high hit rate—not always in terms of box office, but in terms of movies that have found some kind of lasting audience, whether in theaters, on DVD, or through streaming. It’s especially notable just how many stars had a major career breakthrough at the festival—so many, in fact, that it was a challenge keeping this list to just 20.

As we’ll note in multiple entries, these aren’t always first appearances, or even first starring roles (though many of them are). But they’re all well-known stars who reached the next level in their careers after a week in Park City. Think of this also as a Sundance history primer, because every single one of these movies is at least worth a curiosity watch. In some cases, they’re downright essential—especially for fans of the stars in question.

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Jonathan Majors

Jonathan Majors, The Last Black Man In San Francisco (2019)

Mont, the best friend Jonathan Majors plays in The Last Black Man In San Francisco opposite star and co-writer Jimmie Fails, isn’t necessarily designed to be a scene-stealer. Both characters are quietly affectionate with each other, and reflective about the gentrification they’re witnessing in their city every day; a more conventional movie would make one the romantic lead or the comic relief, to generate a stock contrast between the two. It’s all the more impressive, then, that Majors pops off the screen anyway, whether teamed with Fails (skateboarding around town), or on his own (intervening in a neighborhood confrontation by offering notes on the performances). It’s no wonder that offers from the likes of Spike Lee and Marvel quickly followed.

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Anya Taylor-Joy

Anya Taylor-Joy, The Witch (2015)

Anya Taylor-Joy has become something of an indie-cred scream queen, playing variously witchy, bewitching, and uncanny characters that take advantage of her preternaturally spooky affect while remaining grounded in recognizable human behavior. That all started with her performance in The Witch—her film debut, by virtue of her being cut out of Vampire Academy. Taylor-Joy plays Thomasin, a young woman in the 17th century suspected of witchcraft by her own family, an ostracization both cruel (she is blamed for the wrongdoing of others) and perhaps somewhat understandable (she has very large eyes). She returned to Sundance two years later for the similarly unnerving Thoroughbreds, cementing her status as one of the festival’s strongest recent finds.

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Michael B. Jordan

**Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale Station (2013)**

Michael B. Jordan had plenty of acting experience before he starred in Fruitvale Station, appearing on over a dozen TV series and showing off his movie-star charisma in Chronicle. But this docudrama about the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, a young man killed by an Oakland police officer in 2009, announced his arrival as a grown-up actor, and kickstarted his ongoing collaboration with director Ryan Coogler. Their three-for-three streak of heartbreakers began with their most naturalistic film, a sort of anti-biopic in which Jordan has the space to fill in quotidian details of Grant’s experiences and make them dramatically compelling without resorting to showboating.

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Elizabeth Olsen

Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)

Nothing about Elizabeth Olsen’s performance as “Girl In Car” in 1994’s How The West Was Fun could prepare audiences for her surprise grab for the title of Best Olsen Sister in Martha Marcy May Marlene, in which she plays a woman who has escaped the clutches of a cult and makes halting, paranoid attempts to re-join the real world. Olsen is so vivid in this role, and so well-known now as the Scarlet Witch, that it’s easy to forget that Martha Marcy May Marlene was her first movie. (Galvanizing though it was, How The West Was Fun was merely a TV production.)

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Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence, Winter’s Bone (2010)

Plenty of Sundance alumni have gone on to great success over the years, but Jennifer Lawrence may be the only instance so far of someone experiencing their breakthrough at the festival and then becoming one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Lawrence’s hiatus from the spotlight (Don’t Look Up was her first real starring role in three and a half years) shouldn’t obscure the fact that her Oscar-nominated turn in the second installment in Debra Granik’s still-incomplete “bone” trilogy (see another entry on this list for the first installment) kicked off an astonishing hot streak. In the six years that followed, Lawrence starred in two major franchises, garnered three more Oscar nominations and one win for her series of collaborations with David O. Russell, and ensured movies about a mop inventor and a space creep made way more money than otherwise conceivable. She’s also damn good in Winter’s Bone, a tough indie that deserved all the awards attention it received.

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Carey Mulligan

Carey Mulligan, An Education (2009)

Carey Mulligan seemed to emerge fully formed as an actor in An Education, even though it wasn’t her screen debut and she was also playing a teen girl struggling to define herself. As Jenny, a smart but constricted teenager who enters into an affair with an older man (Peter Sarsgaard), Mulligan expresses both her desires and frustrations with emotional precision. She received her first Oscar nomination for the film, and while she’s only received one other since (for Promising Young Woman), her work in movies like Shame, The Great Gatsby, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Wildlife forms as strong a filmography as just about any performer her age.

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brick and Mysterious Skin (2005)

Has anyone had a more impressive Sundance than Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 2005? While he was already known for 3rd Rock From The Sun and playing an entitled “nice guy” in 10 Things I Hate About You, his movie career really took off following his Sundance-approved performances as a teenage shamus and a charismatic but reckless hustler in Brick and Mysterious Skin, respectively. Brick gives Gordon-Levitt plenty of movie-star material, as he carries off Rian Johnson’s stylized dialogue with aplomb and imbues an amateur sleuth with defiant energy. He couldn’t have asked for a better proof-of-range to accompany it than Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (which premiered the previous year at Venice but screened again at Sundance ’05), where he gives a decidedly different physicality to teenage alienation.

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Vera Farmiga

**Vera Farmiga, Down To The Bone (2004)**

The history of Sundance has no shortage of addiction stories, but this feature directing debut from Debra Granik is especially haunting, in large part because of Vera Farmiga’s performance as Irene, a woman in the throes of a bad drug habit. Farmiga was a working actor for years prior to this movie’s Sundance premiere, but anchoring such a bleakly intimate story felt like proof that she could take on just about anything; no wonder Down To The Bone proved to be her bridge from character acting to leading roles.

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Evan Rachel Wood

Evan Rachel Wood, Thirteen (2003)

Catherine Hardwicke’s parenting melodrama can, frankly, run a little hot on its “teens running wild!” panic, even if it was based on the experiences of co-star Nikki Reed. But there’s no denying the film’s visceral effectiveness, especially in its raw performances. At center is Evan Rachel Wood, kicking off a cycle of willful-youth characters as a former honors student turned wild child. Plenty of actors have used Sundance movies to shake off kid-actor sweetness; Wood is an especially memorable case, having successfully redefined her kid-actor career while remaining keyed into a kid’s harrowing experiences.

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Peter Dinklage

Peter Dinklage, The Station Agent (2003)

Peter Dinklage made his film debut with the 1995 Sundance selection Living In Oblivion, a comedy about the making of an independent film, wherein the actor was given the memorable task of angrily, hilariously dismantling the art-movie cliché of using a dwarf to signify the trippy menace of a dream sequence. But Dinklage became a bona fide leading man with another, less caustic Sundance picture: Tom McCarthy’s The Station Agent, a gentle dramedy about a loner who gradually forms a bond with his new neighbors, drawing on Dinklage’s considerable range (about to be displayed again in the new Cyrano). McCarthy has a knack for serving talented actors who don’t fit Hollywood ideas of the leading man; he also crafted vehicles for fellow Sundance alum Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) and for Paul Giamatti (Win-Win).

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America Ferrara

America Ferrara, Real Women Have Curves (2002)

The coming-of-age narrative bones of Real Women Have Curves are pretty standard, including some classic screen-writerly timeline-fudging for extra drama. (No, high school students do not typically face big decisions about college in the final weeks of their senior year, even if their teacher knows someone at Columbia). It’s the details that set Patricia Cardoso’s movie apart as it digs into body issues, complicated mother-daughter dynamics, and the specifics of Latinx families living in East Los Angeles. Crucial to its success is a star-making first-timer performance from America Ferrara. Comic, tough, and touching all at once, Ferrara makes for a thoroughly winning heroine; no wonder audiences have been happy to spend time with her on a weekly basis as the lead of multiple TV shows in the years since.

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Jake Gyllenhaal

Jake Gyllenhaal, Donnie Darko (2001)

A decade or so after playing Billy Crystal’s kid in City Slickers, Jake Gyllenhaal came of age in the weirdest way possible: starring as a 1980s teen haunted by a figure in a rabbit costume foretelling apocalyptic doom. (He also nailed the second-weirdest way possible: appearing in Bubble Boy.) Richard Kelly’s first and purest expression of sci-fi angst took some time to earn more widespread appreciation, so it makes sense that while it was outgrossed even by the likes of, uh, Bubble Boy in 2001, it feels more and more like a defining performance of Gyllenhaal’s career: intense, beautiful, irreverent, weirdly charming.

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The cast of Wet Hot American Summer

The cast of Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

The Wet Hot American Summer cult didn’t really form until the movie hit DVD; while it got some positive notices from its Sundance premiere, its subsequent theatrical release was a flop. These days, its comedy-classic status belies just how many of its cast members were virtual unknowns at the time. This movie had a pre-Saturday Night Live Amy Poehler; a pre-Betty Brant, pre-40-Year-Old Virgin, pre-Hunger Games Elizabeth Banks; and the first-ever film role for one Bradley Cooper, now a multi-hyphenate repeat Oscar nominee. Hell, even a known quantity like Paul Rudd was essentially rebirthed by his work here; cue thousands of perfectly cartoonish Ruddian double-takes.

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Mark Ruffalo

Mark Ruffalo, You Can Count On Me (2000)

Mark Ruffalo was kicking around movies and TV for over a decade before he experienced his big breakthrough courtesy of Kenneth Lonergan, who previously directed him in his play This Is Our Youth (which, a few years later, also helped fellow Sundancer Jake Gyllenhaal shore up his theatrical cred). Lonergan’s first feature cast Ruffalo as the charming yet wounded, loving yet irresponsible brother of Laura Linney. Both performers are frequently great, but it’s possible that neither have ever been better than they are here.

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Michelle Rodriguez

Michelle Rodriguez, Girlfight (2000)

Both director Karyn Kusama and star Michelle Rodriguez have gravitated toward genre fare since making Girlfight together; Kusama has made several fine horror pictures, while Rodriguez has embraced action and sci-fi in the Fast & Furious and Resident Evil series. Yet there’s something special about the scrappy earnestness of their mutual debut, a worthy Grand Jury winner at Sundance. The toughness that Rodriguez’s action movies can sometimes flatten into monotony has greater depth of feeling in her performance as a Brooklyn teenager who fights her way into the boxing ring.

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Aaron Eckhart

Aaron Eckhart, In The Company Of Men (1997)

A young Aaron Eckhart had the sharp handsomeness of a Hollywood hero, so it’s brave that for his first major movie role, he decided to play a literal Chad—a sociopathic, misogynist corporate climber who engineers a cruel scheme to manipulate two different co-workers. Eventually, Eckhart took some of the big-studio roles that matched his look, but Neil LaBute’s first and best film hung over his image, making him seem appropriately dangerous even as a good guy. Maybe it was a smart career move, after all.

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Geoffrey Rush

**Geoffrey Rush, Shine (1996)**

Today, a biography of pianist David Helfgott starring Geoffrey Rush sounds like obvious awards bait. But Shine didn’t so much adhere to a formula for Academy success as help create it, in part by becoming the first Sundance premiere to score a Best Picture nomination. Rush also got his Oscar, and his patchwork of TV, theater, and film roles retroactively became a prelude to a career full of period pieces, pirates, and Academy Award nominations—until recent allegations of sexual misconduct brought his career to a halt.

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Parker Posey

**Parker Posey, Party Girl (1995)**

It’s easy enough to assume that every movie Parker Posey made during the five years following her 1993 screen debut played at Sundance. While that’s not exactly true—she was in Coneheads, after all—many of her ’90s highlights did play the festival, and one of them, Party Girl, was her first true starring role. Posey is at her archly beguiling best as a feckless social butterfly who unexpectedly becomes a Dewey Decimal-infatuated librarian—a concept so striking and durable that it became a Fox sitcom which, predictably, couldn’t find much success without Posey’s force of personality at center.

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Ashley Judd

**Ashley Judd, Ruby In Paradise (1993)**

The least-country Judd would eventually become a staple of ’90s thrillers, but she doesn’t need to be pursuing serial killers and/or revenge in order to hold the screen. Her first screen role is a quiet slice-of-life drama loosely inspired by Jane Austen, where her character, Ruby, starts over in a Florida tourist town. Though the movie’s literary overtures sometimes muffle the drama—Judd can make the heavy amounts of voice-over she’s given feel natural, but she can’t personally cut it down—at its best Ruby In Paradise does have a graceful short-story quality, courtesy of Judd’s performance and sensitive direction from Victor Nuñez, a founding member of Sundance.

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Steve Buscemi

Steve Buscemi, Parting Glances (1986)

Indie icon Steve Buscemi became a movie-geek fixture in the ’90s, but before his collaborations with the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, and Happy Madison, he had one of his biggest early roles at a Sundance so early it wasn’t yet called Sundance. (The moniker was adopted in 1991.) As different as some of those early Sundance lineups can look from the buzzier incarnations that followed, Parting Glances feels of a piece with ’90s indies: a chatty, rueful dramedy about a New York couple on the brink of a long-distance relationship. As it happens, the couple in question is two gay men, with Buscemi playing an ex-boyfriend afflicted with AIDS—two cinematic milestones the film treats with a casualness that has aged well. If anything, the movie’s problem is the way Buscemi’s energy and humor outshines many of the other characters.

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