Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed role is just one part of a ban­ner year

When Andrea Rise­bor­ough​‘s name was called along­side her fel­low Best Actress nom­i­nees at this past Tuesday’s Acad­e­my Award announce­ment cer­e­mo­ny, much of the chat­ter con­cerned the abrupt­ness of the word-of-mouth cam­paign that seemed to take shape overnight mere days pri­or to the close of vot­ing. Some cried foul that a sys­tem hereto­fore known to run on mon­ey and influ­ence-ped­dling had been gamed, oth­ers were amused that these mech­a­nisms had been placed in plain­er view than usu­al, and a third fac­tion was busy Googling ​“to leslie + movie + 2022 ?”

From a dead­pan con­spir­a­tor in the com­e­dy Mind­horn to a lovelorn met­al­head in the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Mandy to a shape-shift­ing assas­sin in the sci-fi brain-melter Pos­ses­sor, few tal­ents of her gen­er­a­tion match her chameleon­ic abil­i­ty to van­ish into her roles. (A friend has sug­gest­ed that everyone’s slow on the uptake about her being one of our great­est work­ing actors because it’s often dif­fi­cult to clock the per­son onscreen as Andrea Rise­bor­ough, so total are her pow­ers of trans­for­ma­tion.) Her lit­tle-seen yet wide­ly-acclaimed per­for­mance as an alco­holic sin­gle moth­er in To Leslie is just one piece of a ban­ner year, arguably not even the finest work she’s turned in over the past twelve months. Sur­vey­ing her busy 2022 alone, see­ing how she runs the gamut of tone and inten­tion, the wide range of her var­ied skill set comes into view.

To Leslie is being hailed as a feat of kitchen-sink real­ism, but Rise­bor­ough takes even big­ger risks — and reaps greater rewards — in the affect­ed high-camp style of Aman­da Kramer’s Please Baby Please, com­ing to UK cin­e­mas this spring. My fel­low Amer­i­cans and I have had a few months to soak in the reck­less genius of her appear­ance as Suze, the tap-danc­ing, cross-dress­ing, solil­o­quy-recit­ing vamp thrown into per­son­al flux by threats from a gang of greasers. As she and her hus­band each real­ize they’ve got a more lib­er­at­ed rela­tion­ship to gen­der and sex­u­al­i­ty than they first thought, the the­atri­cal­i­ty of her over-the-top line-read­ings and body lan­guage keeps her in pace with a film steeped in the over­heat­ed emo­tion of mid­cen­tu­ry melodrama.

With a pre­ci­sion affirm­ing her con­trol even as she verges on the car­toon­ish, she dipped into that same the­atri­cal reg­is­ter for a pro­duc­tion that actu­al­ly did orig­i­nate on stage, step­ping in as the wicked, splen­dif­er­ous­ly coif­fured moth­er in the film adap­ta­tion of West End’s hit Matil­da musi­cal. She puts a vil­lain­ous snarl on Mrs. Worm­wood while bring­ing vari­ance to deliv­er­ies that could’ve eas­i­ly banged on one note, her time onscreen an object les­son that restraint is a virtue even when feast­ing on ham.

As in The Death of Stal­in, Noc­tur­nal Ani­mals, Obliv­ion, and a half-dozen more link-ups with name-brand auteurs, she mem­o­rably occu­pies the space allot­ted to her with­out try­ing to swal­low a scene whole. In this past fall’s Ams­ter­dam, she gave a mas­ter­class in this sort of hum­ble excel­lence, ele­vat­ing the oth­er­wise thank­less, func­tion­al role of ex-wife to a quick-draw sketch of per­son­al­i­ty and wry humor. (For the sake of com­plete­ness, it must be not­ed that Riseborough’s 2022 also includ­ed a role in What Remains, a Chi­nese-Finnish copro­duc­tion in the Eng­lish lan­guage that has yet to play any­where out­side of a sin­gle fes­ti­val in Poland. Per IMDb, she por­trays a ther­a­pist work­ing with a men­tal­ly dis­turbed man who’s recent­ly con­fessed to mul­ti­ple mur­ders he may or may not have actu­al­ly com­mit­ted. Smart mon­ey says she’s good in it.)

Tack­ing the words ​“Oscar Nom­i­nee” onto their name for life cer­tain­ly helps an actor make their legit­i­ma­cy known, and so hope­ful­ly her recent fet­ing by the Oscar act­ing vot­ers will com­pel unfa­mil­iar view­ers to seek out oth­er selec­tions from her deep back cat­a­logue. Or, as is per­haps more like­ly, they will dis­cov­er they have already seen her in sev­er­al movies.