There is a pivotal scene in Greta Gerwig’s dust-pink “Barbie” that has come to define the Oscar-nominated movie — a disarmingly truthful monologue that is not delivered by the film’s many Barbies, nor its numerous Kens. Instead, supporting actress Oscar nominee America Ferrera’s Gloria crisply sums up the movie’s themes around a picture-perfect doll confronted by the real-world, patriarchy-fueled challenges of womanhood. “You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory,” she bursts out as part of her longer speech on the impossible expectations so many women navigate every day.
“It was very freeing as an actor to let the words lead me from take to take,” Ferrera tells Variety, about tapping into Gloria’s headspace. “Greta gave me so much freedom and a lot of time to explore different versions of the monologue. I had a lot of fun doing it and felt a real catharsis.” Ferrera wanted Gloria to feel alive with imagination and adventure, while making sure her real-world anxieties and disappointments were still at the core of her humanity. “For me, Gloria’s ability to abandon disbelief was rooted in her childhood experiences. She was longing for that freedom and possibility of child’s play. That longing made her more childlike to me, but also rooted her more deeply as a real person who knew what longing and loss felt like.”
Ferrera isn’t the only Oscar nominee playing a character of complex dichotomies. In Yorgos Lanthimos’ vividly Frankenstein-esque “Poor Things,” which unfolds like a quirky B-side to “Barbie,” actress nominee Emma Stone portrays Bella Baxter, who is, for a while, like a baby trapped in an adult’s body. Over the course of the movie, she becomes a sexually hungry adolescent confronted by polite society’s
patriarchal rules.
In “Oppenheimer,” supporting actor nominee Robert Downey Jr. is driven by his idea of patriotism and his contrasting egotistical drive to undermine the scientists he feels wronged him, while in “American Fiction,” actor nominee Jeffrey Wright plays a serious author who condemns the corporate exploitation of Black culture that reduces it down to offensive stereotypes for profits. Partly as an experiment, he cooks up a pseudonymous alternate persona and publishes the very kind of cliché-filled bestseller that he’s critical about. As Monk’s brother, supporting actor nominee Sterling K. Brown’s Cliff is someone living his truth as an out gay man for the first time, closing the gap between his outward image and his authentic identity after his divorce from his wife.
Supporting actor nominee Robert De Niro’s powerful Oklahoma rancher William Hale also fits the bill of a character of extreme internal contrasts. In Martin Scorsese’s crime-thriller “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Hale pretends to be an ally to the Osage people, while perpetrating and enabling their murders during the 1920s. “I don’t understand a lot about my character,” De Niro admitted at the film’s press conference in Cannes. “Part of him is sincere. The other part, where he’s betraying them, there’s a feeling of entitlement,” he continued. “It’s the banality of evil.”
Evildoing takes an even more complex turn in Christopher Nolan’s towering “Oppenheimer” — in it, actor nominee Cillian Murphy’s eponymous character is a man of science, one increasingly burdened by his split moral conscience in building an atomic bomb. “I had to consider that these were the biggest moral dilemmas, the biggest moral paradoxes that potentially anyone in the history of man has faced,” Murphy tells Variety. “And then of course there are the more human dilemmas that he had to face in terms of his own life. That final interrogation at the end of the movie, with Jason Clarke playing [Roger] Robb, is one of my favorite sequences because that’s where we really get to see inside the soul of Oppenheimer. It was a true challenge, but one that I relished.”
Elsewhere, actor and actress nominees Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan play Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre, the illustrious and devoted couple of Cooper’s “Maestro” who kept their ahead-of-its-time marital arrangement — the sexually fluid Bernstein saw other men, emotionally challenging his wife over the course of the movie — private. Dedicated to authentically exploring the marriage’s complexity, the co-stars and friends bonded onscreen and off. The two even teamed up to perform as narrators onstage in a Philadelphia Orchestra production of Bernstein’s “Candide” operetta, with the “Maestro” music consultant Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting. “That was a major, major part of cracking how I could make a love story about these two and have it be honest,” says Cooper, noting that he and Mulligan bared their souls to one another in dream workshops as part of their process.
With Montealegre, there is “a sense of a bit of a life unlived,” Mulligan told Variety. “There was an unknown element to what she could have been had she not met Lenny. She met him, and they became each other’s world. But that obviously put her career on the back burner.” She added: “It felt to me that the betrayal for her — and the sense of loss that she experiences — isn’t to do with his physical relationships with other people. I think it was the fact that he started looking to somebody else for the comfort and reassurance and support that he needed in his life. And that was what, ultimately, she found too difficult.”
In “Anatomy of a Fall,” Sandra Hüller plays a character (also named Sandra) who becomes a suspect after her husband mysteriously dies from a fall. She insists on her innocence in court. But did she kill him? That’s the unanswered duality in her performance. “I think I wanted to create somebody who would be capable of doing it. I wanted certain people to be a little bit afraid of her,” she revealed to Variety about the ambiguity of her character. “Because why do we always have to be sweet and good victims and all these things? I had a little fun in leaving it in a dark.”
Ultimately, Hüller never really made up her mind one way or the other about Sandra’s possible guilt. “Sometimes I wake up at night and think, ‘Oh, I missed something. Maybe she did it.’ But I don’t know.”
