15 Best Actor contenders for the 2024 Oscars

Nicolas Cage is no stranger to the Oscar race. He’s been nominated for Best Actor twice before, for Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation, and took home a statue for the former. In A24's Dream Scenario, he plays an ordinary guy who becomes an instant celebrity after he starts popping up in the dreams of millions of strangers. Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick Of Myself) gives Cage an opportunity to play against type as a schlubby everyman who doesn’t know what to do with his sudden viral fame. The Academy loves it when an actor immerses themselves so fully into a role that they become unrecognizable, and that’s exactly what Cage has done here.

Bradley Cooper’s extensive makeover in Maestro has already gotten a lot of attention based on early reactions to the marketing material. It’s not just a cosmetic transformation, though. Cooper, who also directed and co-wrote the film, leaves nothing on the table in his tour-de-force performance as legendary American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, adopting a mid-Atlantic accent and a specific physicality to match the man himself. Prestige biopics like this tend to garner a lot of attention around awards season, so the chances are good that Cooper could land in more than one category this year—as he did with his directing debut A Star Is Born, which earned him nominations for Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t need any fancy prosthetics to transform himself into dimwitted pawn Ernest Burkhart, the character he plays in Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon. Burkhart is an aimless World War I veteran who enters into an advantageous marriage to a wealthy Osage woman (Lily Gladstone) with the encouragement of his conniving uncle (Robert De Niro). Buoyed by equally strong performances by Gladstone and De Niro (who are both likely to receive some accolades of their own), DiCaprio convincingly conveys his character’s bewilderment at the predictable outcome of his terrible choices. It’s a role unlike any he’s played before, and one that’s already captured the attention of critics and moviegoers. That momentum could conceivably carry him to a few nods come awards season.

Coming off overwhelmingly positive responses at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals this year, Colman Domingo’s commanding turn in Rustin has been touted as a major part of the film’s success. George C. Wolfe’s biopic about the man who helped Martin Luther King Jr. organize the historic 1963 March on Washington highlights the tension between Bayard Rustin’s identity as a leader of the civil rights movement and his identity as a gay man. Domingo and Wolfe previously worked together on 2020’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the creative partnership built through that experience clearly provided a foundation for one of the best performances of the year.

It’s too easy to make jokes about an actor named Adam Driver being cast as the founder of one of the most iconic auto manufacturers in history, or the fact that he previously played another notorious Italian entrepreneur in House Of Gucci, so we’ll set those aside for now (we’re only at the beginning of awards season, after all, and you’ve got to spread them out). Other than the Italian connection, though, Michael Mann’s stylish, high-octane biopic Ferrari has little in common with Ridley Scott’s campy, fashion-forward family crime drama. In the lead role of Enzo Ferrari, Driver certainly has a chance at a third nomination (he was previously nominated for Best Supporting Actor for BlacKkKlansman and Best Actor for Marriage Story) in recognition of his measured and confident interpretation of the complicated industrialist struggling to keep both his business and his personal affairs from crashing and burning.

Fair Play is one of those films that seems to have been waiting in the wings all year for its big moment, and that moment could come in the form of a nomination for its male lead, Alden Ehrenreich. After buzzy showings at Sundance and TIFF, the erotic thriller got a theatrical release in September before arriving on Netflix on October 6. Writer-director Chloe Domont’s debut explores sexual politics in the world of high finance through the prism of a relationship between secretly engaged co-workers Luke (Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor). When Emily is promoted to an open manager position over Luke, his simmering resentment bubbles over, leading to a toxic battle of the sexes. Ehrenreich reaps the benefits of being well suited to the role of an entitled, volatile Yale grad who believes the world owes him a living, yet he’s not wholly unsympathetic. That’s the great trick of the film, but it doesn’t work without Ehrenreich nailing the character’s duality.

Any actor would relish the chance to play a character like the unnamed assassin at the center of The Killer, but perhaps few could do it as well as Michael Fassbender. The entire film hinges on his precise, unblinking (and we mean that literally) portrayal of an elite hitman whose life is upended after he misses one important shot. Through voiceover narration, Fassbender brings the audience into his world with wry observations, personal philosophy, and detailed explanations of his process, creating an intimate bond with viewers while keeping his distance from everyone else. He’s the living embodiment of director David Fincher’s signature aesthetic: cool, minimalist, and devastatingly effective.

Based on the true story of one man’s legal fight to save his funeral home business from greedy corporate interlopers, The Burial gives Jamie Foxx a stage to strut his stuff as a larger-than-life character inspired by the real-life attorney who argued the case. With an assist from an array of flashy suits, a private jet, and an entourage, he captures the theatricality of personal injury lawyer Willie E. Gary’s oversized personality, but also taps into a deeper emotional core through his connection to his client, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Could Foxx add another Oscar to his shelf to go along with the one he already has for playing Ray Charles in the biopic Ray? Whatever happens, he certainly seems to be having the most fun of all the contenders this year.

On paper, the character Paul Giamatti plays in The Holdovers has a lot in common with Miles in Sideways, his first collaboration with director Alexander Payne (a film that got love from the Academy in the form of five nominations, including for Best Picture). They’re both teachers, both aspiring writers, and both smarter than most of the people in their orbit. But despite those surface similarities, Giamatti’s walleyed Paul Hunham is completely his own man. Set at a prestigious boarding school in the winter of 1970, The Holdovers finds Paul, an unpopular history professor, left behind during the holidays with just one troublesome student (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s cafeteria manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). It feels like a role Giamatti was born to play, and may very well have been tailor-made for him as well.

Freud’s Last Session is the film adaptation of a play about a fictionalized meeting between Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) shortly before Freud’s death in 1939. Expanding upon the two-hander stage version, it illustrates their discussions about God, family, and, of course (this being Freud, after all) sex, with visual flights of fancy. Hopkins, as deft and vigorous as ever at the age of 80, not only holds his own but gives a bravura performance as the father of psychoanalysis. Though this year’s field of outstanding actors vying for nominations is a tough and crowded one, you can’t ever count out Hopkins as a contender.

Building upon his Oscar-nominated supporting role in last year’s The Banshees Of Inisherin, Barry Keoghan comes into his own in Emerald Fennell’s latest psychological thriller Saltburn. As outcast Oxford University student Oliver Quick, Keoghan serves as our point of entry into the opulent world of Saltburn, the sprawling family estate owned by his schoolmate Felix (Jacob Elordi). Early word on the film out of the Telluride Film Festival this summer mostly concerned Keoghan’s multiple scenes of full frontal nudity, including a sure-to-be notorious nude dancing scene, but once the shock of that wears off perhaps he’ll get his due as a bona fide leading man. If Academy members are willing to look past that member they may find a multi-faceted performance worth honoring.

From the moment Christopher Nolan’s biopic project was announced, it was clear that Oppenheimer had Oscar on its mind. Its summer release date (with a boost from Barbie) gave everyone who wanted to see the film in theaters a chance to experience it on the big screen by now. That head start on awards season could be an asset for Cillian Murphy, who portrays the conflicted father of the atomic bomb across multiple timelines in the film. Not that he needs it. Murphy has often been cited as the frontrunner for Best Actor by awards watchers for his gripping performance, and that status doesn’t look likely to change, even with all the new faces entering the race as we close out the year.

If there’s a dark horse candidate in this year’s Oscar race, it has to be Joaquin Phoenix in Ridley Scott’s upcoming historical epic Napoleon. Phoenix has four acting nominations, including a win for Joker, so it’s fair to say that the Academy likes him. It was his performance in Joker, in fact, that got the attention of Scott (who had previously directed him in Gladiator) and helped land him the role of the famous French emperor who set out to conquer Europe. Scott’s film focuses on his rise to power and a conquest much closer to home, the heart of his future wife, Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby). Phoenix is an inspired choice for the role, it’s just a question of whether his performance will get lost in the spectacle of Scott’s grand vision.

A dreamy meditation on love and loss written and directed by British filmmaker Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), All Of Us Strangers centers on Andrew Scott’s character Adam, a troubled Londoner who starts up a relationship with his mysterious neighbor, played by Paul Mescal. Soon after, he finds himself drawn back to his childhood home, where he’s able to have conversations with his dead parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell). Scott has been so outstanding in everything he’s done so far, it’s amazing he’s not a bigger star than he is. His mesmerizing performance in this film may or may not change that, even if he does get a Best Actor nod, but it’s likely to bring him the kind of prestige that will lead to bigger film roles in the future.

American Fiction sells itself on its smart premise alone (borrowed from Percival Everett’s Erasure, the novel it’s based on)—an English professor fed up with the stereotypical depiction of Black culture in popular literature writes a prank book of his own using the same well-worn tropes and inadvertently becomes a huge success. It’s Wright’s Oscar-worthy performance that really sells it, though. He shows both his comedic and dramatic chops in the role of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who has to wade through several identities throughout first-time director Cord Jefferson’s sharp satire, exploring new depths of the character yet always keeping the film afloat. Expect to be hearing a lot more about this film and Wright’s performance in it as awards season heats up.