Kristen Wiig

Kristen Wiig broke through with the Los Angeles comedy troupe The Groundlings and then spent seven seasons on Saturday Night Live, from 2005 to 2012. Sketch built the toolkit she still uses: characters defined by one escalating tic, played with total commitment and no wink to the audience.

What she does better than almost anyone in American comedy is discomfort. Her best work lives in the gap between what a character is performing and what she is actually feeling, and she will hold that gap open well past the point where a normal performer would break it with a joke. Annie in Bridesmaids is a woman losing at life in front of an audience of women who are winning, and the film is funny in direct proportion to how badly it hurts. The Skeleton Twins runs the same material with the safety net removed. Barbara Minerva in Wonder Woman 1984 is built on the identical engine, an invisible person granted exactly the wrong wish, and Wiig plays the early, hopeful half so well that the rest lands harder than the script deserves.

She writes as well as performs, and she has a second, entirely separate career in animation: Lucy across the Despicable Me films, Ruffnut through the How to Train Your Dragon trilogy, Brenda in Sausage Party. The live-action supporting roles are where she is most reliably underrated, though. Annie Montrose in The Martian, Cheryl in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Charlotte in The Diary of a Teenage Girl are all small parts played by someone who clearly read the whole script.