Amanda Seyfried

Amanda Seyfried started acting at fifteen, in daytime soaps: Lucy Montgomery on As the World Turns from 1999, then All My Children in 2003. Her feature debut was Karen Smith in Mean Girls in 2004, a part written as a punchline that she played with total sincerity, which is why it is the performance people still quote twenty years later. Veronica Mars and five seasons of Big Love followed.

She then spent most of a decade as a studio lead in films that were not worth her, a run including Dear John, Letters to Juliet, Red Riding Hood and In Time. Her range was never really the problem. Seyfried has an unusually wide face for the camera, capable of looking guileless and calculating in the same shot, and the mid-budget romances she was handed only wanted the first half of that. The exceptions from those years are the ones that hold up: Needy in Jennifer's Body, Cosette in Les Miserables, and the wounded parishioner in First Reformed.

The reset came with Marion Davies in David Fincher's Mank in 2020, which brought Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations and reintroduced her as a serious actress. Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout completed it, winning her both the Golden Globe and the Primetime Emmy, and it is a genuinely uncomfortable piece of work: the voice, the blink rate, the strain of a person performing conviction. She was named to Time's list of the hundred most influential people in 2022, and her films as a leading actress have grossed over 2.4 billion dollars.