What a long, strange trip it’s been for the 13 actors who earned their first Oscar nominations this year. Familiar faces include “Succession” stars Kieran Culkin (manic concentration camp tourist in “A Real Pain”) and Jeremy Strong (despicable lawyer Roy Cohn in “The Apprentice”) for supporting actor consideration; supporting actress nominee Isabella Rossellini, iconic in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” acknowledged for her role as an uncompromising nun in “Conclave”; “Avatar”-famous Zoe Saldaña, supporting actress-nominated as the intense lawyer with fierce dance moves in “Emilia Pérez”; and Guy Pearce, overlooked 23 years ago for “Memento” but nominated now in the supporting actor category for his industrialist-art patron turn in “The Brutalist.” Lead actress nominee Fernanda Torres, well known in her native Brazil, brings ’70s-era activist Eunice Paiva to life with soft-spoken conviction in “I’m Still Here.”
The Class of ’25 First-Timers Club also includes these seven newly minted Academy Award nominees:
Warming up: Spanish-born Gascón honed her craft on Mexican telenovelas and in 2018 began the transgender transition that helped inform her “Emilia Pérez” performance.
Killer scene: Adorned with gold teeth, stringy hair, face tattoos and beard, Gascón’s crime boss Manitas shocks Zoe Saldaña’s lawyer character by confiding: “I want to be a woman.”
Quotable: Recapping her rapport with director Jacques Audiard, Gascón said in a statement, “Since I don’t speak French and he doesn’t speak Spanish, I asked Jacques, ‘How will we communicate?’ He gave me a very beautiful answer: ‘Telepathically!’”
‘Emilia Pérez’ star Karla Sofía Gascón has made Oscars history as the first out transgender woman to be nominated in an acting category.
Warming up: Homeschooled in L.A., Madison played a difficult teen in Pamela Adlon’s acclaimed “Better Things” series and portrayed Manson family member Susan “Sadie” Atkins in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.” Before filming “Anora,” she learned how to twerk.
Killer scene: During a chaotic 28-minute sequence, petite Madison as Ani likely sets a record for the most F-bombs dropped per minute while breaking an intruder’s nose and biting his accomplice on the neck after they invade the mansion she shares with the cowardly son of a Russian oligarch.
Quotable: Madison told The Times “Anora” preparations included asking her dad to get a stripper pole. “Can you pick something up at this place and install it at my house? He called me after and was like, ‘Hey ... is this for a job?’”
The director and the actor on the humor and pathos and tension and scary moments — sometimes all at once — in their prize-winning film.
Warming up: “Ghost” and “Indecent Proposal” made Moore the highest-paid actress in Hollywood at one time, but it was the movie star’s career as an over-50 talent that fueled her understanding of the film’s show business-as-jungle metaphors.
Killer scene: Getting ready for a date, Moore as Elisabeth studies her mature face in the mirror, finds it wanting, smears the lipstick into a grotesque smile and claws her hair with the fury of a trapped animal.
Quotable: “Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a popcorn actress,” Moore famously said last month in her Golden Globes acceptance speech. “That corroded me over time to the point where I thought maybe I was done with what I was supposed to do. And at a low point, this bonkers script came across my desk and the universe told me, ‘You are not done.’”
With “The Substance,” the star has a hit movie that speaks to the “violence we can have against ourselves in the pursuit of some idea of perfection.”
(as up-and-coming businessman Donald Trump)
Warming up: Born in Romania, Stan previously portrayed drummer Tommy Lee in miniseries “Pam & Tommy.”
Killer scene: Stan’s remarkably subtle transformation from eager-to-learn Young Trump to Older Trump culminates in a tour de force of body language, gesture and speech when he shares his “attack, attack, attack” philosophy with the ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal.”
Quotable: “I can’t believe I’m in Romania while receiving this news,” Stan said the day Oscar nominations were announced. “I’m stunned. I’m speechless. I’m humbled. I guess this is what they mean by the American Dream.”
Warming up: A movie star in his native Russia, Borisov portrayed machine-gun inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov in “AK-47” before winning over “Anora” director Sean Baker with his nuanced character work in 2021’s “Compartment No. 6.”
Killer scene: Borisov as Igor, slouching on Ani’s couch, engages in broken-English small talk that warmly evokes their shared humanity despite the physical madness that came before.
Quotable: “It’s like I’m sitting in the car and looking around while going 200 miles an hour,” Borisov told The Times, describing the impact of his first English-language film. “It’s moving very fast, and I’m still just inside the car.”
The actor explains his hired-muscle character’s inner conflict. How can he help out a friend but also not harm the woman at the center of the struggle?
Warming up: Barbaro earned a degree in dance from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and held her own opposite Tom Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick.” Getting ready for “A Complete Unknown,” she learned to finger-pick guitar and sing with Baez’s signature vibrato.
Killer scene: At the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, Barbaro as Baez invites Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) onstage, telling him to “Sing the f— song” before launching into a duet of “It Ain’t Me Babe” that sparks with in-sync eye-contact chemistry.
Quotable: Barbaro called Baez directly to discuss the movie. “When we got off the phone, I let go, finally, of this piece where I felt like I had to impress her,” Barbaro said in a statement. “I realized in talking to her that there was no amount of studying or perfecting that I could do to become her. She’s a unicorn.”
Warming up: By the time Grande made her Broadway debut in 2008’s “13: The Musical,” she was already obsessed with “Wicked,” having met Kristin Chenoweth, the original Glinda, at age 10. Once the Grammy-nominated, multiplatinum pop singer landed the role, Grande trained with vocal coach Eric Vetro (whose students include Timothée Chalamet and Renée Zellweger) several days a week for months to shift her voice into a more operatic, Broadway-style mode.
Killer scene: Taking on Glinda anthem “Popular,” Grande resisted suggestions to try a hip-hop arrangement. While director Jon M. Chu hid under the bed of the cramped bedroom set, Grande as Glinda hit every high note, old-school-style.
Quotable: Three makeup-free auditions left Grande in emotional tatters, she recalled in a statement. “I had been pacing around my house waiting for the news, and when I finally got the call and Jon told me I was their choice for Glinda, it was the best moment of my life, no questions asked.”
Ariana Grande proves herself a ‘modern-day Lucille Ball’ with ‘Popular,’ the funniest number in ‘Wicked.’ The film’s creative team explains how it all came together.
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