Elizabeth Banks

Elizabeth Banks spent roughly ten years as the best thing in other people's comedies. Wet Hot American Summer, the receptionist in the Spider-Man films, a memorably deranged one-night stand in The 40 Year Old Virgin, a small-town wife in Slither: she was who directors called when a scene needed lifting, and nobody was willing to build a film around her.

The specific gift is playing absurdity with total sincerity. Effie Trinket could have been a costume with lines attached. Banks made her a woman genuinely upset about manners while children are being sent off to be killed, which is the closest The Hunger Games gets to satire. Avery Jessup on 30 Rock works the same way, and so does Gail in Pitch Perfect, whose commentary is delivered with the flat conviction of a person who has never once doubted herself.

She stopped waiting for permission early. Brownstone Productions was founded in 2002, well before any of that. Pitch Perfect 2 was her directing debut and opened to sixty-nine million dollars, a record for a first-time director. What came after is less tidy: Charlie's Angels was a relaunch that never settled on a tone, while Cocaine Bear knew exactly what it was and is much better for it. The performance worth arguing about is Love and Mercy, where she plays a woman slowly working out how much control someone else is being kept under, in a register nothing else in her filmography uses. It is the strongest evidence that the comic typecasting was always the smaller half of her.