No one with access to Netflix and an iota of sense would argue that Holly Hunter isn’t one of the most mesmerizing, versatile and instinctual actors to come along in the last three decades. But her work (and the acclaim that’s come along with it) has somehow never made her a Movie Star. That’s usually reserved for actors we can label, understand and consume, confident in exactly what we’ll get. And that’s fine – sometimes you buy a jelly donut because you want a jelly donut – but Hunter’s CV is a reminder of how much we stand to lose if an actor buys into any one idea of her abilities or niche as an artist.

Born on a farm in Conyers, Georgia (which might partially account for the voice we’d listen to even if the screen went blank), Hunter earned a drama degree at Carnegie Mellon before moving to New York, and later to Los Angeles. That voice made an off-screen, uncredited debut in the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple, after which they wrote a breakout part specifically for her in Raising Arizona. The Coens don’t pick actors lightly; few (Hunter and her former roommate Frances McDormand come to mind) can play farce with such sincerity. The same year, her fiery, vulnerable Jane Craig in Broadcast News stripped any vestige of cliché from the driven career woman archetype and earned her an Oscar nod.

A few years later she stunned viewers and critics alike in Jane Campion’s The Piano. The Los Angeles Times wrote that her unnerving performance as a mute woman sold into marriage in mid-19^th century New Zealand reached a once-in-a-lifetime level of intensity. “Hunter, celebrated for her fast-talking firecracker roles, is mesmerizing as the silent Ada, doing her own playing of Michael Nyman’s expressive period score, her face a compendium of flinty looks that could bend steel.” And the will of anyone with an award to hand out in 1993. She won the Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Cannes awards for Best Actress, and then turned right around for a screwy character role in The Firm. “[Hunter] doesn’t appear for about 40 minutes and it’s a long wait,” ran The Guardian’s review, “But once she does, naturally, her cockeyed nonchalance steals the film – so innocently even Cruise didn’t seem to mind – and converts what was looking like a thriller dirge into a vaudevillian romp.” She simultaneously won an Emmy for The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader, and we’re still in 1993 here. And should you need any further proof of what Hunter can do with a role, go back and watch Crash, Thirteen, Roe vs. Wade, When Billie Beat Bobby and Top of the Lake.

Does she play strong, fragile, erotic, stone-faced funny, quirky or intense? Yes. It’s hard to categorize someone who’s taken lead and character parts, dramas, comedies and biopics – often concurrently – and jumped into TV long before all the kids were doing it. You could call it a career strategy if Hunter acted on anything other than impulse, but she rarely does. “I tend to act on desire, so my career was always about, ‘Do I want to do this or not?’” In that sense, she’s ambitious, telling an interviewer in 2013, “I feel a great entitlement to get cast in something if I’m dying to do it.”

But those parts have become more scarce over time, partly because Hollywood still hasn’t learned how to do much of interest with mature actresses; in 2013 The Atlantic ran an article titled “20 Years After The Piano: We’ve All Failed Holly Hunter.” Probably so. But hunting for roles she likes (“I go all over the place to find them: cable TV, network movies of the week, foreign films, independent American films, studio films, the stage”) has served her well. In 2016’s Strange Weather, Variety wrote that Hunter “has just delivered one of her richest, most lived-in performances, playing a mother struggling to come to terms with her son’s suicide…She’s sexy, willful, and admirably, at times, infuriatingly self-possessed. It was a part she jumped at and one that will hopefully remind casting agents and directors of her prodigious talents.” The Hollywood Reporter was equally smitten with her work in this year’s buzzed-about indie The Big Sick, which it said she threatened very seriously to steal. Its improvisational comedic ethos was new turf for Hunter, but as The Hollywood Reporter noted, “Hunter commits with hilarious ferocity.” And Collider called her “the most stunning addition” to this year’s star-packed Terrence Malick ensemble Song to Song.

Rather than asking herself what kind of roles she wants, Hunter asks herself a more important question: “’‘Do I still want to act? Do I still want to reveal?’ And I do.” Thank god.

And speaking of… When she took the role of a hard-drinking, promiscuous detective dogged by a Heaven-sent emissary in TNT’s Saving Grace, it prompted lot of press questions about Hunter’s own spirituality. “I feel like telling stories is a spiritual exercise and I think that it’s something that we need as a culture and as humans,” she told the news service Digital Journal. “You put your nightmares up there, you put your dreams up there and people can see them better because they can stand outside of it and recognize themselves inside it. I feel that in and of itself is a spiritual thing.” To which we say, amen.

Why is it that the plastic faces, absurd body language and outrageous confidence of unimaginable characters can ring so suddenly and hysterically true when brought to life by a skilled comedian? Harmony Moonglass, Big Sue, Sarah from Date-Zaster, Todd and “international philanthropist” Whitney Peeps never existed before Lauren Lapkus unleashed them on us, but out they spring, ridiculous yet recognizable as heightened versions of people we know. The crazy (or terrifying) part is how she seems to spawn them as quickly as they escape to places like Comedy Bang! Bang!, and her own mind-boggling podcast With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus.

A childhood spent filming sketches with her brother, watching sitcoms and taking improv classes as a high school student will do that to a person. Growing up in Evanston, Illinois, she wanted nothing more than to be Adam Sandler or Chris Farley; she settled instead for graduating DePaul University, moving to New York and promptly joining UCB Theater (she’s still a member of its flagship Asssscat show). At that point, a lot of hopefuls would focus on getting an agent; Lapkus focused on having fun, finding her own performance opportunities and doing as many good shows as she could.

It set her up well for a 2010 move to L.A., where she quickly found a sketch community and the first big breaks of her career. Her gawky, wide-eyed naiflike persona read younger than her 25 years and got her cast in a Jimmy Kimmel Live! sketch as a staffer fired by Ryan Reynolds. That led to small movie roles and her first TV series, Are You There, Chelesea?, on which she played Dee Dee, quite possibly the world’s weirdest roommate. The following year a self-taped audition led to a two-season run as prison guard Susan Fischer on Orange Is the New Black, where no other actress could’ve made her character’s attempts to be mean more nuanced, pathetic or funnier. Looking at her relatively short track record versus her talent, it seems amazing she’d be cast in the 2015 blockbuster Jurassic World the next year, but she was one of the best things about it. Collider said Lapkus and fellow supporting actor Jake Johnson were “responsible for a good deal of the movie’s most effective one-liners while still managing to give their characters a warmth and sincerity lacking in most of the main players.”

Last year, she wrote and starred in the inaugural episode of Netflix’s sketch show The Characters, the best overview of her internal clown factory to date. In its review, The A.V. Club called her “…one of those sketch comics who never seems happier than when she can slather on the makeup, wigs, funny teeth, and strange voices and make a spectacle of herself. Indeed, Pamela, the cranked-out psycho that’s one of the many characters she plays here would be right at home beside some of [Amy] Poehler’s most dangerously insane Upright Citizens Brigade characters, sharing with them a crazy-eyed scabrousness that’s vivid enough to be as frightening as she is funny.”

And to a kid who grew up idolizing the cast of Saturday Night Live, next year must already feel completely surreal – she’ll star opposite Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly in Sony Pictures’ comic take on Holmes and Watson.

But despite the rush of screen work, Lapkus remains one of the most adroit comic improvisers in the business, with or without an audience that can actually see her. In a recent profile, The A.V. Club declared, “At this point, Lapkus is basically a queen Midas of any podcast episode she touches, and listening to her regularly hold her own with veterans, it’s easy to understand why.” She is a regular on too many to mention, including the aforementioned With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus. Each week her guest is actually the host of their own podcast, with Lapkus appearing as a “guest” on their show. Still with us? The “host,” usually a fellow improv vet , dictates in the moment who Lapkus will be. Splitsider called it “a wonderful reminder of how powerful and transformative tomfoolery can be in the right hands.” That would be the hands of someone who commits in a way that would scare a lot of actors. In her view, “You can’t really get as much done when you’re worried about looking gross. It’s also not as much fun.”

We may never completely understand what makes someone jump with abandon into creative situations most of us would do anything to avoid. In that regard, comedians like Lapkus deserve far more credit – and gratitude – than we usually give them. “To me, the most important thing about comedy is the joy it can bring to the performers and the audience alike,” she told Backstage a couple years after her move to L.A. “I love making people laugh…Some of my favorite moments are when I’m doing a scene with friends and I can’t stop laughing. Not quite professional behavior, but if everyone in the room is laughing, it makes it a little more acceptable.” Those moments of shared, uninhibited hilarity are not only acceptable, but as an audience of humans, some of the best we’ll ever have.

It’s easy to name the star of your favorite TV show, right? They get the most lines, the biggest story arcs and your longer Entertainment Tonight segments. But done right, it’s the less conscripted supporting characters that are often more interesting to watch. And few do them better than Michaela Watkins. GQ was paying attention when a lot of us were looking in whatever direction studio marketing was pointing. “Watkins has played an absolutely impressive and consistent and memorable parade of characters in television and movies for over a decade. If a TV show is super funny, Michaela Watkins likely has a super funny guest arc on it.” We’d expect nothing less from an actor whose three favorite words to hear from a director are “just go crazy.”

She was doing that long before she started piling up the small but stellar film and TV appearances making increasing demands on the scroll bar of her IMDb page. Being a keen mimic by age eight helped her keep everyone laughing – something she saw as her role as her parents went through a painful divorce. As she told Jewish Journal, “It was my way to be seen by my family and later the opposite sex. My way of flirting was, ‘Watch me shove a whole hamburger in my mouth.’” Career and life lesson number one: Humor trumps vanity every time.

It also landed her in a community theater British farce as a 15-year-old, where she realized the only thing better than an audience was a captive audience. “They have to sit there. They can’t leave!” After studying theater at Boston University, she moved to New York and found herself struggling to build a career. An impulse road trip to Portland became a four-year immersion in regional and traveling theater, but in 2001 she decided it was time to move to L.A. and get herself on a TV show.

Her first TV appearance was on The WB’s Charmed, which could be considered an artistic step down from the thea-tah, but Watkins didn’t see it that way. She gave herself permission to go full throttle in any direction, and episodic TV work allowed her time to pursue interests closer to her heart. She joined The Groundlings to hone her improv and sketch skills, and that’s where Lorne Michaels discovered her. Career and life lesson number two: Best not to limit yourself to one pre-conceived path.

Her hilarious sendup of Arianna Huffington landed her on Saturday Night Live, but her most memorable character was Angie Tempura, an iced coffee-drinking, celebrity-snarking, secretly Zac Efron-loving computer nerd whose catch phrase “Bitch Pleeze” temporarily became a website. Anyone on SNL better be able to do a damn good impression, but Watkins’ true skill as an actor is her ability to read what’s behind the facial tics and speech patterns, and they don’t always come from a funny place – hit YouTube and watch her SNL Hoda Kotb impression closely.

When she was let go after only one year on the show, Entertainment Weekly wondered, “What was Lorne Michaels thinking?” We may never know, but the blow was softened a bit when he told Watkins he thought she deserved her own show. She agreed, and went right back out to L.A. to work on that. What she got was more supporting roles, enriching series like The New Adventures of Old Christine, Enlightened, New Girl, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Modern Family and ABC’s short-lived but well received Trophy Wife. She did the same in indies like Wanderlust, Afternoon Delight and In a World… She also co-wrote Benched, USA’s 2014 sitcom about a high-powered corporate lawyer’s implosion and subsequent humbling as a public defender.

If Watkins became known for writing and playing “crazy ladies,” maybe it’s because she loves them, and hates filters. “Of course I don’t like to think of myself as one, but maybe I am,” she told Vulture. “I’m always drawn to them; I think it’s because I’m attracted to people who aren’t in the business of people-pleasing, who say what they really think.”

But she can do a lot more than crazy, and proof came in 2015. The Lorne Michaels Prophecy was fulfilled, and Casual’s gain is every other TV show’s loss. Watkins stars in the Hulu dramedy as Valerie Meyers, a recently divorced therapist venturing into online dating with the help of her dating app-developer brother. The show tackles dating and family dysfunction from different perspectives, while showing what Watkins can do when not relegated to comedic expository support. The New York Times likened Casual to an episodic independent film, writing, “Ms. Watkins is outstanding, playing Valerie as tense and fallible and sympathetic,” while Vanity Fair predicted, “Audiences will come to realize they’ve been underestimating the actress for the past seven years.”

If you’ve been guilty of the same crime, not to worry. Casual is entering its third season, and she still shows up on other series (Veep, Angie Tribeca, Speechless) when she can. She also has roles in four films this year with several more in the hopper. Whether they’re leads or supporting roles doesn’t much matter. For Watkins, it’s about the projects and people involved. “I made a pact with myself when I was 12 that I would only work with people who make me happy. I choose happy.” And that, friends, is career and life lesson number three – the only one you really need.

In the 2012 film Ruby Sparks, a novelist struggling with writer’s block gets some input on one of his characters: “You’ve written a girl, not a person.” In hindsight, Zoe Kazan seems destined to not only have written the line, but to embody the mythical stereotype it skewered.

When Kazan was young – not to mention precocious and wildly imaginative, she just wanted to grab a crayon and get to it already. The daughter of screenwriters and the granddaughter of director Elia Kazan and playwright Molly Kazan, she began writing early and regularly, a smart and serious student whose emotional intelligence would’ve been a tipoff about her future, had a school play not already sealed the deal. Coming home from the audition, the 14-year-old realized it was what she was meant to do with her life. “I had that thing inside of myself, without which you can’t get through the terrible rejection that comes with being an actor.”

Or sometimes, even being a high school student. Kazan recalled to Playbill feeling at odds with what seemed necessary to win popularity or boyfriends. “I felt so set apart by the schools I was applying to for college and knowing the answer in class. I remember sitting in English class, going, ‘Someone else, please raise your hand,’ and feeling so lonely.”

She felt less so at Yale, where she earned a B.A. in theater and was a member of its highly selective Manuscript Society. Plans to continue in the university’s school of drama were derailed by an agent who suggested she give acting a try first. So much for an M.F.A., but spending night after night on stage tuned into the rhythm of dialog and audience response will teach you a lot about theater. A year after graduating, she landed her first professional stage role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and her Broadway debut came two years later in Come Back, Little Sheba. Her performance as Masha in Chekhov’s The Seagull cemented her status as an emerging talent and New York critics’ favorite. New York magazine wrote, “The increasingly indispensable Zoe Kazan slips grace notes of sadness into a broadly funny performance as Masha,” and the New York Times’ Ben Brantley agreed. “Ms. Kazan, who just gets better with every performance, tastily brings out the self-lacerating perversity in Masha’s defeatism.”

You can almost summon a visual of Kazan simultaneously honing her on-stage work while squirreling away the creative arsenal and confidence for her dual career as the writer she’d also intended to be. A year after Seagull, her play Absalom was produced at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, again winning the Times’ praise for its “believably human characters, speakable dialog,” and – maybe not surprisingly – her “instinctive feel for mining drama from the neuroses, insecurities and obsessions of the creative classes.” Not two years later she mined the subject to equal acclaim in her play We Live Here.

Meanwhile, film roles were increasing in number and variety, even if they were confined to smaller independents that lent themselves both to her off-kilter charm (she calls “They wanted a different look” code for “not pretty enough”) and her artistic sensibility. Her clear, intelligent interpretation of supporting roles in Revolutionary Road, Me and Orson Welles and Meek’s Cutoff made her eminently watchable, and signaled what she might bring to a leading role, given the chance. It came with 2009’s The Exploding Girl, a largely improvised story about a young girl dealing with epilepsy and the transition to adulthood. The Los Angles Times’ Kenneth Turan gave Kazan a good deal of credit for the film’s success. “Because so little happens in terms of action, Kazan has to hold us with nothing more than the emotions that play with subdued personal force on her face. Though her work here may seem like a performer being herself, it’s actually a highly controlled example of some of the hardest acting to achieve.” The same could well be said of her Emmy-nominated turn as a meek pharmacy clerk in HBO’s Olive Kitteridge.

So what is an avowed and hyper-talented feminist doing in rom-coms like What If, I Hate Valentine’s Day and yes, Ruby Sparks? Stealthily infiltrating the genre to make us see it in a new way. Kazan cited Pygmalion as her inspiration for Ruby, and it’s easy to see Kazan herself as a Pygmalion of sorts, reverse-conjuring the characters she writes and plays from “ideal” women to real ones. She does true justice to a real one in the Sundance smash The Big Sick, playing a slightly fictionalized version of Emily Gordon, girlfriend of the film’s star, standup comedian Kumail Nanjiani. Reviewing for The Playlist, Noel Murray wrote, “Zoe Kazan can transform even the most stock role into something indelible. In the broadest sense, her character Emily is about as basic as they come. She’s “the girlfriend” — the woman whose humor, kindness, and vivacity gives the hero the catalyst he needs for change. But Kazan is hilarious and three-dimensional, able to turn on a dime from goofy to guarded to outright angry.”

Maybe the true measure of a feminist is how equally one respects and judges both male and female characters in her work. Kazan acknowledges our human inclination to idealize romantic partners, but also the fact that those partners live inside people who are also cranky, self absorbed, funny, and ordinary. She’s a double-threat reminder of why we need not just more female voices in the arts, but more original ones.

It would be easy to commiserate with Zoe Lister-Jones about the difficulty of getting movies made, or the lack of opportunities for women in the industry. But unless you, too, are actually doing something about it, think before you kvetch.

The actress/singer/playwright/screenwriter/film director/songwriter (feeling lazy yet?) is best known for her roles on sitcoms like Whitney, Friends With Better Lives, and her current turn as Life In Pieces’ endearingly kooky Jen Short, where she’s revealed a wonderful bent for physical comedy. Her career’s on steady ground these days, but the interesting part is how she got it there. (Isn’t it always?)

Lister-Jones’ mom enrolled her in acting classes at age 10 to help her overcome shyness, and as a teenager growing up in Brooklyn, she auditioned for musical theater but never made the cut. Her video-artist parents didn’t shield her from the fact that acting could be an insecure life – or discourage her from pursuing what she loved. Lister-Jones wanted a stable future, but she also wanted a creative one. That they rarely go together discourages some (make that most) people; it makes others work really freaking hard. After graduating with honors from the Tisch School of the Arts, she burned CDs of herself playing piano ballad renditions of pop and rap bangers, and used that material in Co-dependence is a Four Letter Word, her one-woman, 10-character show, a project that won her an agent and a manager.

She got some breaks – stage work, supporting movie roles and more than her share of “crying for cash” L&O episodes – but the break that really counted was self-made, literally. In 2009 she and boyfriend (now husband) Daryl Wein wrote Breaking Upwards, a script based on an attempt to save their own struggling relationship through an experiment with non-monogamy. Which seems almost easy compared to the economics of trying to shoot a feature-length film in New York City for $15,000. She and Wein played the lead roles, he directed, she cooked for the cast and Craigslist-recruited crew, with everybody pitching in on tasks like splitting PVC pipes for dolly tracks. Lister-Jones also wrote lyrics for the film’s original soundtrack. The marketing budget allowed for just enough chalk to write the film’s title on sidewalks around the city and some homemade rap and reggae promo videos on Funny Or Die. The film earned comparisons to Annie Hall, and praise for its creators’ mix of humor, raw emotion and scrappiness. Lister-Jones and Wein were the subject of a New York Times article on sweat equity in the independent film industry.

That hard-earned calling card opened doors – and budgets. Lister-Jones got several million to make 2012’s Lola Versus, which she co-wrote with Wein and co-starred in with Greta Gerwig. She found herself confronting less optimistic numbers as she prepped for Band Aid, her directorial debut. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University reported in 2016 that gender representation in professions like editing and sound design is still wildly skewed towards men. Their study found that women counted for 17% of all editors working on the top 250 films of 2016 and just 5% of all cinematographers on those same films. Of that same sample, 3% of composers, 8% of supervising sound editors and 4% of sound designers were women.

As a female filmmaker, you’d have good reason to complain…or to hire a 100-percent female crew. “Nothing was changing,” said Lister-Jones in a recent interview. “It felt like in order to effect change, I needed to subvert the paradigm entirely.” The networking and recruiting involved in building an all-female crew from scratch wasn’t easy, but she saw it as a way to break a cycle. Industry execs will tell you it’s too hard to find female filmmakers with enough, or the right kind, of experience. Thus female filmmakers don’t get enough, or the right kind…well, you get it.

Band Aid is the story of a couple who, in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, decide to turn all their fights into songs and start a band. If it echoes chords of Breaking Upwards, it speaks to Lister Jones’ ear for the universal in relationships and her knack for writing rounded characters that rarely verge into typical male/ female stereotypes. It’s a very funny and sharply observed movie, but also an emotional one, and she found having a crew of women helped her tap into its poignant moments more easily. The proof was in the premiere: Band Aid debuted at Sundance and was snatched up by IFC Films and Sony Pictures.

Band-Aid was released this month to excellent reviews, but Lister-Jones deserves the highest praise for intent alone – her drive to succeed as an artist is helping others do the same. “I think I was raised with a lot of awareness around how painful it is to make art that goes under-recognized, and to have to take other jobs that in turn sacrifice your creative space,” she told Vogue. “I have so many friends who struggle. Making a living from your art is such a rarity; I was there for many years myself, and I continue to struggle in my own ways. I’ve carved out a path, but not without lots of roadblocks.” Roadblocks she’s taken it upon herself to remove – a perfect job for Big Women, the all-female construction business she once invented as part of an elementary school assignment. Its slogan was “There’s no job too big for Big Women.” How better to crack the proverbial celluloid ceiling than cracking us up in the process?

In 2009 The New York Times ran a story about the New York Comedy Festival and the independent standup community that had become a hunting ground for late night shows looking for the next round of potential talent, citing Jenny Slate, Donald Glover, Aziz Ansari and Zach Galifianakis as formerly unknown comics lifted from the cramped rooms of obscure bars in hidden basements to a larger stage. The article’s new reference was a guy named Kumail Nanjiani, who “could be poised to follow… Or not.”

On circumstance alone, “or not,” seemed more likely. Nanjiani grew up in Karachi, Pakistan (“not necessarily a very funny place”), raised Shia Muslim in a predominately Sunni nation. But a lot depends on how you see things. His dad was a psychiatrist (a fact he found inherently funny) with an inexplicable love of designer jeans (just blatantly funny). He got a taste of American comedy through movies his dad occasionally brought from the video store, and TV shows like Beavis and Butt-Head and Picket Fences. When he moved to the U.S. for college – and his own safety – he was most excited about being able to see movies and TV shows right when they came out. One of the first happened to be a Jerry Seinfeld comedy special on HBO. Nanjiani was 18 and had never seen standup before. A shy Computer Science/Philosophy double major, he finally worked up the courage to do a 30-minute set in his senior year. He walked on stage so nervous he could barely move, and walked off feeling ready for Letterman.

Or at least Chicago. He got a day job and started doing standup at night, developing his first one-man show, Unpronounceable, which The Comic’s Comic called “a very personal and quite poignant work, punctuated by powerful punch lines.” It got him an agent and brought him to New York and the attention of the Times. Nanjiani never considered that comedy might not work out. He wrote standup material in the mornings, potential TV material in the afternoons and did open mics every night, twice a night if he could. Steadfastly refusing to look at the big picture, he focused only on each step. “What’s next? Now what’s next?” His wife has said she sometimes worried about paying rent, but never about his work ethic.

The “nexts” started piling up quickly in the form of TV appearances on The Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live, Portlandia, Franklin & Bash, Veep and too many others to mention. Small movie roles (Collider called his scene in 2013’s The Kings of Summer the funniest part of the movie) started as a trickle and became a steady downpour – sixteen from 2013-2016 alone. In the biggest bit of karmic fortune, Mike Judge, whom Nanjiani had idolized since his Beavis and Butt-Head fandom, cast him as one of the stars of his hit series Silicon Valley. “When I was casting, I was looking for actors you could believe were really intelligent programmers but were also able to play the comedy of it all,” Judge told The Washington Post. “I thought he was fantastic.” As Dinesh Chugtai he veers between sarcasm and charm, and a blend of ambition and insecurity you might expect in a Pakistani immigrant programmer trying to be cool – and maybe a Pakistani immigrant comic who actually wasn’t very good at his five-year tech day job. We’re guessing Nanjiani sees the humor in that one, too.

That kind of exposure can be heady stuff, but Nanjiani never let writing and standup take a back seat to his increasingly packed schedule (or his proudly geeky video game and X-Files podcast passion projects). In 2014 he co-founded The Meltdown, a Comedy Central standup series filmed in the back of a comic book store, featuring his loose, unrehearsed banter with co-host Jonah Ray, and guests like Nick Offerman, Marc Maron, Rachel Bloom, Fred Armisen and Reggie Watts. His second special, Beta Male, premiered on Comedy Central in 2013 to raves. From A.V. Club: “Kumail Nanjiani could easily be ‘that guy.’ He could be the Pakistani guy, joking about his otherness in America, his life growing up as a Muslim in Karachi. He could be the videogame guy, playing off his excellent podcast, The Indoor Kids, which caters to the thriving crossover crowd of gaming and alt-comedy nerds. But he’s not. He can weave those themes into his act without it feeling shticky.” Or too narrow.

That praise grazes what he’s called the elephant in the room. His Muslim upbringing does play a role in his work, perhaps more unavoidably now than ever. But as his career progressed, Nanjiani determined not to ignore it, but also not to commoditize it or take roles that exaggerated it. His comedy became wider and his talent more apparent. He is relaxed and observational on any number of topics, and a master of setup, his build to a joke often funnier than the punch line itself. He has a comic’s timing and a storyteller’s ear.

That sense for story finally made him turn to the biggest one in his own life. He penned an account of how his real-life girlfriend’s serious illness jolted him into maturity and coming to terms with his conservative parents. His (now) wife Emily V. Gordon co-wrote the script, Judd Apatow produced, Michael Showalter directed, and Nanjiani went to acting class in order to play a fictionalized version of himself. The Big Sick sent studios scrambling at Sundance this year (Amazon won for $12 million); Variety wrote that he and Gordon “…mine their personal history for laughs, heartache, and hard-earned insight in a film that’s by turns romantic, rueful, and hilarious. It’s a no-brainer to connect with art-house crowds who like their comedies smart and funny, but this one deserves a shot at the multiplex, too. Where most movies might be content to follow the culture-clash comedy through its typical ups and downs, The Big Sick proves to be a far messier affair, and all the more rewarding for it.”

Nanjiani recalls the first joke he ever wrote: “I wrote about how I always wanted to have a unit of measurement named after myself, because all the cool scientists had one. Then I’d do an act-out of a submarine commander telling his crew to turn the torpedoes up to 5 Nanjianis.” If you’re measuring in laughs, better turn it up to 11 Nanjianis.

Sam Elliott is one of the most iconic character actors of our time, and he probably never had a choice in the matter. Before he utters one gravely bass word, the craggy, mustachioed face and lanky frame already conjure a laconic drawl and the scrape of old boots on a dusty, creaking floor – a cowboy/sheriff/tough guy/mysterious loner straight out of Central Casting. Or as Elliott puts it with typical wryness, “I’m not one of those actors anyone’s going to confuse with a chameleon.”

Growing up, his dad didn’t even confuse him with an actor, telling him he had “about a snowball’s chance in hell,” of becoming one. Elliott knew otherwise. More importantly, he knew that acting wasn’t about making money, and that his longevity depended on being careful of the roles he selected. Childhood movie matinees cemented his admiration for men who – in or out of tall hats and tall boots – stood for something. “I’ve turned a lot of stuff down because it’s not the kind of guy that I wanted to represent myself as being,” he told Variety. “I’ve certainly played an asshole from time to time…but there’s enough assholes in the world.”

After doing plays throughout his school years, he moved from Oregon to L.A. to pursue acting. Most peg The Big Lebowski as his big break, but his first one came in 1976, courtesy of a director’s wife who mistook him for another actor. It landed him his first lead in a film called Lifeguard, a film rich in real life parallels, for those who choose to sniff them out. He plays a guy struggling with the decision to do what he loves versus succumbing to pressure to do – and be – something else. You wouldn’t have known that from the movie’s marketing, but we’ll let him tell you that story.

A steady stream of supporting film and TV roles followed: The Shadow Riders, Gone to Texas, The Quick and the Dead, Tombstone, Buffalo Girls, You Know My Name, Mask and Conagher (which he also co-wrote and produced). If they play on his taciturn toughness, they also pay tribute to his instincts as an artist. “I’ve often thought that any actor’s best work is the stuff between the lines.” Nevertheless, he was thrilled when he got the script for The Big Lebowski, figuring it was his chance to do something different. Until he read it. They’d cast him as a cowboy. Well, if even the Coen brothers see you as an inscrutable wrangler, maybe it’s time you just accept it. So he did, playing an ex-Marlboro Man in Thank You for Smoking, and earning money between jobs putting his trademark voice to work in commercials for the American Beef Council, Coors beer and Ram Trucks.

It’s a funny business, though. Two years ago, the industry seemed to notice something that’d been pretty obvious all along. While fans have called him “87 percent testosterone,” his brand of masculinity doesn’t rely on explosions, bulging ego, bulging muscles or roaring soundtracks. It derives from character, confidence, decency, ease, and if need be, friendly menace. In other words, nuance.

In 2015 alone he had three indies at Sundance: Digging for Fire, I’ll See You in My Dreams, and Grandma, for which many demanded he receive Oscar consideration. Variety wrote that in his 10 on-screen minutes, Elliott created “a fuller, richer character than most actors do given two hours,” going from “welcoming host to angry jilted lover to open wound, with devastating effect.” RogerEbert.com’s more succinct verdict: “Elliott gives a performance that sets the movie on emotional fire.” I’ll See You in My Dreams proved he could master comedy without ever departing from his artistic core, The Guardian pointed out, “Elliott’s yacht-owning Bill exudes cool, getting laughs out of the audience with merely a glance.”

This year, he gets a much-deserved lead in The Hero, playing Lee Hayden, a fading western star who tries to mend fences with his family as he faces a medical crisis. You can’t ignore the irony of the role, nor can you imagine anyone else playing it. “Elliott succeeds in pulling you into Lee’s emotional orbit and holding you there,” said The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s a low-key, largely reactive performance, and all the more moving for it: The actor’s most memorable moments don’t come via tantrums or tearful breakdowns, but in scenes where he simply looks and listens — wounded, hopeful, resilient and, yes, heroic.” Variety called it “a love letter to a talent that was until recently widely enjoyed, while remaining strangely under-appreciated.”

Even if this “rediscovery” prompts an eye roll, we’ve got no quarrel with more screen time for Elliott, especially when it shows us more sides of his talent. He took some convincing to try his first multi-cam sitcom (Netflix’s The Ranch), but he’s quickly become the best thing about it. He’s still not completely at ease with the format, but someone who’s still willing to be uncomfortable after nearly five decades in the business is someone who should remain in the business. He’s guest starred on Parks and Recreation, Grace and Frankie and Justified, and recently signed on to 2018’s remake of A Star is Born, in a role co-star Bradley Cooper reportedly wrote specifically for him. Elliott’s a humble straight shooter who’s grateful for every moment of his long career, which thankfully doesn’t appear to be headed anywhere near the sunset.

People have feelings about Jim Jefferies, and you won’t find them anywhere near the middle. The standup-pugilist pulls no punch lines and takes gleeful swings at women, religion and politicians, saving the hardest hits for hypocrisy wherever he finds it (almost everywhere). He’s also known for handing out the C-word as liberally as, well, a raucous comedian from Australia. Some people find him hilariously honest; others don’t like having their ears boxed.

Though it’s likely inconceivable to those who know him from his standup specials, his original assault on our ears was supposed to be more mellifluous. He studied musical theater and performed with Opera Australia before vocal chord nodules sidelined his singing ambitions. He pursued another long-held ambition instead, trying open mic nights – not very successfully – as a 17-year-old. But by 23, he’d found a rhythm, a minor following and a spot as an opener for fellow Aussie Gary Who on a tour of Outback mining towns. He made a serious decision: “Fuck it, I’ll just be a comedian!”

Why not? If all you need is confidence, Jefferies had all he needed and then some, once telling a magazine interviewer that if he were gigging in biblical times, Jesus would’ve opened for him. (Thinking about it, that water-to-wine thing wouldn’t have sucked as a warm-up act.) Ironically, his confidence came largely from poking fun at himself; the humor that some perceived as misogyny came from his experiences of being dumped by every woman he ever dated.

And Jefferies has never written jokes for the amusement of any audience but himself. When they didn’t translate as quickly as he’d hoped in his own country, he went to the UK, then the U.S. and eventually almost everywhere else, constantly touring to bigger crowds and venues. His quick, ruthless and yet somehow jovial style found a following, helped by some unexpected (if not surprising) events. When a heckler attacked him on stage in Manchester in 2007, the clip went viral and became a part of his 2008 UK comedy special Contraband. An unintentionally well-timed comparison of gun control policy in Australia versus the U.S. in his 2014 special BARE was another viral sensation. Earlier this year, a profanity-laced outburst at Piers Morgan, a fellow guest on Bill Maher’s Real Time, sent him viral once more. When Morgan denied the president was attempting a Muslim ban, Jefferies shot back, “Oh, f— off. Hitler didn’t kill the Jews on the first day. He worked up to it.” All of it cements Jefferies’ rep as one of our most fearless comic voices, and one of our most intelligent, even if you have to listen around the swearing to hear it.

As Interrobang observed in its review of his 2016 special Freedumb, “His comedy, his stage presence, and his commentary on various political and social issues have all been finely honed like a high-quality blade, and holy shit does it cut deep. That’s because Jefferies’ style isn’t crass for the sake of being crass: it is, in its own way, an ode to free speech and the ability to joke about anything, regardless of whether some might deem it in poor taste. Jefferies is going to straightforwardly and very plainly hit every topic that his heart desires, critics be damned.” Of those critics, Jefferies says, “I do enjoy people who write in letters of hate or storm out of my shows – there’s something about me that thinks that that’s when I’m doing my job right.”

Many people thought he was doing his job right on his two-season FX series Legit, which – if still seeped in debauchery – portrayed (and commendably, employed) disabled actors in a very human way. Not the canonized or pitiable characterizations we often see, they were part of the jokes – not the butt of them. Jefferies wrote and starred in Legit, and would like to do more acting, though as a guy who’s described himself as “just a bit too good looking to be a character actor but not good looking enough to be a leading man,” knows he’ll have the best shot by writing his roles himself.

It’s been a decade since he took that punch on stage in Manchester, and his humor has evolved with his life, which now includes a son and a bit more stability. But only to a certain extent; install a filter between his brain and his mouth, and you don’t have the same product. And that product is in demand, most recently from Comedy Central, which ordered 10 half-hour episodes of The Jim Jefferies Show, a late night series in which Jefferies will travel the world to serve up the week’s top stories and most controversial issues with generous helpings of his own opinion.

Even the only career Jefferies says he’s cut out for doesn’t escape his ridicule (why would it?). In a 2015 interview, he mused, “What I always found weird about standup comedy is that people seem to listen to us sometimes like we’re prophets, like we’re the ones speaking truth about society – we’re a bunch of fucking morons who didn’t go to university and have no real education giving half-baked ideas… Comedians are really the last people you should listen to.” Maybe, if you can’t take a punch. But given our choices – the internet? politicians? dogma? – we’ll take our chances.

Maybe Danny McBride’s success as a comedic writer and actor comes from his failure as a redneck. Born in Georgia and raised in small-town Virginia, he grew up around “alpha-male rednecks and all these dudes with this crazy confidence that didn’t really have anything to back it up.” A quiet kid who shied away from cowboy boots and wanted to go to film school, he found his loudmouthed, narrow-minded peers intimidating. And ultimately, hilarious. He started making movies in his back yard, many of which he didn’t realize until later were uncomfortably dark, explaining in a 2011 interview “I’ve always loved comedy that wasn’t appropriate for my age. I was always into shit that was way dirtier than what I should have been watching, and I loved anything that felt naughty. In fifth grade I had all of Eddie Murphy’s Delirious memorized. It was the funniest shit I had ever seen.”

Even if that’s all you know about Danny McBride, it explains a heck of a lot about some of his most memorable characters, and how we react to them. The first was created out of necessity. He went to North Carolina School of the Arts to become a writer/director, not to act. Then with only a shoestring budget for a film that he realized no studio was going to finance, he did what he had to do. Thus was born Fred Simmons, one arrogant bully of a self-involved strip-mall marshal arts instructor with an adulterous wife and imploding life. No distributors bit on The Foot Fist Way at Sundance in 2006, but DVDs started making the “you gotta see this” circuit of agents and assistants, eventually landing in the hands of the comedy triumvirate of Adam McKay, Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow, who’s first thought was, “How can I get Danny into one of my movies so that people will think that I discovered him?” Hollywood had taken a comedy sucker punch, but came off the ropes fast, casting him in comedies like Hot Rod, Superbad, The Heartbreak Kid, Pineapple Express and Tropical Thunder, to the tune of three or four movies a year. Seth Rogen, a frequent co-star, explained it. “Danny’s fun to write for. He has an epic nature to his speech, something Patton-esque, even though the characters he plays are usually so stupid and reprehensible.”

But McBride is best when he writes his own characters, taking advantage of how well he knows them in all their foul-mouthed, offensive glory. In 2009, he and writing partners Jody Hill and Ben Best created Eastbound & Down, McBride playing Kenny Powers, a washed up, racist former major league baseball pitcher bursting with anger management issues and self-regard. A GQ reviewer wrote, “It didn’t take long – Kenny Powers says, “You’re fuckin’ out!” about twenty-seven seconds into the pilot – before I was certain that Eastbound had clamped a node onto this dark, devolved, otherwise unused hunk of my brain and pumped the funny in. I took the first season in one sitting, straight to the face. I laughed until I made sounds I hadn’t heard before, and by the time I straightened up, I couldn’t get Kenny’s delivery off my tongue.” Despite some objections to its sex and profanity, the show ran for four seasons on HBO, and as with The Foot Fist Way, the star nearly outshone the vehicle. McBride/Kenny Powers received not only raves, but offers to play minor league ball with the Pensacola Pelicans and an endorsement deal with K-Swiss.

There’s a freedom that comes with playing such self-blind louts, and a delightfully naughty glee to watching them. But what’s unique about McBride’s work is its lack of the clichéd sentimental lessons usually served as a side dish in most comedies. His characters don’t ask for sympathy, which lends a startling pathos to their occasional bleak flashes of self-awareness and powerlessness.

Perhaps McBride – as both a writer and an actor – hits us so hard because he knows where we live. There’s hilarity, but also discomfort, in investing small people living small lives with grandiosity. If we’re honest (and if he’d let us stop laughing for just a second) we might acknowledge that to some degree, that’s most of us.

His most recent gift to television was Vice Principals, a dark (what else?) comedy for HBO co-written with Hill. McBride is Neal Gamby, one of two high school administrators in a power struggle for the top job. Their uneasy alliance to unseat the capable black woman who becomes principal has been cited as many times for being racist and political as it has for being funny. “I don’t see it as a story about race,” says McBride. “It’s a story about power and how people think it can fix things that are dysfunctional in their own lives. With a lot of our comedy we don’t approach the writing as if it is a comedy. We approach it as something dramatic then figure out how to put in dick jokes or ridiculous humor to disguise it.” Maybe what some naysayers are really reacting to is the show’s subtle jabs at our own PC stereotypes. Regardless, McBride isn’t apologetic. And apologetic is exactly what comedy can’t be, if it’s really going to work.

This year, he continues leaving dirty comedy footprints on the small screen, while making a couple departures on the big one, first in Alien: Covenant, and then as a scriptwriter for a John Carpenter/ Jason Blum reboot of Halloween, in which he’s promised “Nobody will be laughing.” Well, even if we do find ourselves stifling giggles at scenes that should in no way be funny, so be it. McBride believes that making us question why we like what we like is what art is supposed to do.

Talk all you want about methods and prep and training versus instinct and natural talent, but ultimately acting will always remain a bit of a mystery to most of us. Billy Crudup is a good example of why.

His shape-shifting physicality alone is pretty inexplicable. In a 2002 Broadway revival of The Elephant Man, he conveyed John Merrick’s monstrous deformities without makeup or prosthetics, relying on painful contortions of his body so believably that The New York Times’ Ben Brantley found him virtually unrecognizable. In one of his earliest leads, the 1998 biopic Without Limits, his gait so closely matched that of runner Steve Prefontaine that his scenes could be seamlessly intercut with archival film of the Olympian’s races. And then there was shamefully under-seen Stage Beauty, where he played a man playing a woman considered one of 17^th-century London’s most ravishing actresses, a role Salon said he understood so well in his bones the performance actually read as a woman playing a man playing a woman.

And then there’s the mystery that transcends the physical, one we suspect is deliberate. Crudup’s characters hold something back, never completely knowable. And when you think about it, what’s more believable than a human who keeps at least some part of themselves hidden? More practically, it keeps us riveted. When an actor can go from charming to menacing to smarmy and back again, virtually without changing expression, we never feel quite safe looking away. The New York Times called it “kinky chameleonism,” and Vulture took note of it in a review of Spotlight. “Billy Crudup nearly stops the show as a super-smooth, super-friendly, 100 percent phony lawyer.” (We won’t argue with the show-stopping part, but read on for the real scoop behind the performance.)

All of which makes him an excellent actor, but a hard-to-place leading man. Hollywood needs a “type” to pin such roles on. But for most of his career, Crudup’s been okay with that. His acting experience was largely in theater at the University of North Carolina and then grad school at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, but within two years of earning his MFA, he was getting film roles in indies like Sleepers and Inventing the Abbotts while turning down opportunities in more commercial projects like Titanic and Hulk. He inadvertently landed in a classic when Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous became an unexpected hit, playing rising rock star Russell Hammond. He needed some guitar lessons for the role, but the unforced charisma he brought to it is beyond teachable.

The downside of becoming a golden god is that it can blind folks to even better work in your archive, such as the aforementioned Stage Beauty. And Jesus’ Son, in which he played the drug-ridden, road-tripping FH. New York Magazine was one of many voices praising his work. “The great thing about FH is that though he’s a woozy drifter, his eyes, his face are always shockingly alive. Crudup has a great physicality, and he gives FH’s gangliness a loose-limbed lyricism.“ The performance almost made one major actress refuse to work with him on a subsequent film – she didn’t want someone she was convinced had to be a drug addict on her set. In 2014’s Rudderless, another under-seen and equally acclaimed performance, his subtlety hits hard. Variety wrote, “Crudup does a lot to keep things watchable, playing with a slightly acidic wryness that suggests the character’s humor has only been heightened by his grieving hopelessness.” A.V. Club and Rolling Stone were just happy to see him strap on a guitar again for the role.

His work in myriad supporting roles (including Big Fish, Jackie, 20^th Century Women) is equally remarkable. But we’d venture that even if you’ve followed his work with the same enthusiasm we have, you still haven’t seen the half of it. Few actors at his level go as frequently and consistently between screen and stage. His theater credits number almost as many as his film roles and include a Tony win (among multiple nods). He’s a noted performer of Stoppard’s work, but our favorite pull-quote comes from Ben Brantley’s review of the comedically chilling The Pillowman: “Mr. Crudup’s finely chiseled features turn out to be ideal for registering the seductiveness, defensiveness and pure vanity of an artist.”

Whether or not Crudup would agree there’s mystery to what he does, he’s never been at pains to explain it. In many interviews, he comes across as a guy who just wants to be left alone to understand his characters and tell their stories as best and believably as he can, once telling The New York Times, “The truth is I don’t think actors should have to do anything but come in and act.” For the record, he loves what he does and feels grateful to do it, but you could understand his frustration with the entertainment press and its thirst for transparency. Do we really want to see the levers and pulleys behind a great performance, or would we rather sit back and enjoy being completely hypnotized by it? We’ll next have that pleasure when he shows up in Alien: Covenant, Justice League, and – after years of being pursued by TV casting directors – the new Netflix series Gypsy, opposite Naomi Watts.

Crudup says his hard-to-pin-down quality hasn’t always worked to his advantage in mainstream Hollywood, but then again, that’s never been exactly what he’s aimed for. And if flying below fame’s radar means occasionally having to reintroduce yourself to the business, so be it; he’s joked that his 50s will really be his decade. For the sake of our continued viewing pleasure, we hope he’s serious.

Guys like Chris Shiflett make you wonder if somehow you just are a musician before you ever pick up a six string and make the decision to become one. In fact, 35 years after getting his first guitar, the Foo Fighters lead guitarist and member/founder of multiple other bands still doesn’t think of music as a career. It’s just his life.

“My earliest memories are of my brothers’ records; all we wanted to do was listen to music and play music,” he told Consequence of Sound. “We never got into sports or really gave a fuck about going to school. My memories are of rock ‘n’ roll bands. I can’t really explain why that is, or what draws me to one sound, it’s just something…a passion.” Or possibly Ace Frehley, who Shiflett aspired to be from the get-go. He got that first guitar at 11 after a failed stab at piano and was in his first band by age 14.

Early brother-sponsored influences were Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Zeppelin, Aerosmith and Nugent, while grade school in the 80s introduced him to Stray Cats, Hanoi Rocks and David Bowie; but as a kid growing up in Santa Barbara, the only concerts he saw were the free ones played by punk bands in the local park. They made an impression. He joined punk outfit Legion of Doom and began opening for bands that came through town. He moved to San Francisco in the late ’90s to work for an independent punk record label and heard about an opening in one of its acts, No Use For a Name. He auditioned on a Thursday and was on tour as their lead guitarist the following Monday. The grit and schlep of life on the road made no impression. In a Metal Hammer interview, he said, “You’re so busy loving it, you don’t care. You’re never sitting there going, ‘I’m paying my dues, one day I’m going to be in a platinum-selling band.’ You’re just stoked that you’re on the road playing gigs.” By that time he was also playing gigs as part of punk cover band Me First and the Gimme Gimmes.

While Shiflett may not have been thinking about platinum selling-bands in 1999, a friend told him Guns N’ Roses were auditioning guitarists and encouraged him to try out. Instead he asked if his friend could get him an audition with another rock outfit also auditioning guitarists. His tryout for the Foo Fighters was nerve wracking, but front man Dave Grohl, who liked Shiflett’s history in the underground punk scene, hired him for their There Is Nothing Left to Lose tour, and he’s been with them ever since. In its review of his first studio album with the Foos, 2004’s Grammy-winning One By One, Rolling Stone wrote, “the band’s latest lead guitarist, Chris Shiflett, has traded distortion for clarity without losing any impact. Potent guitar riffs define every song on One by One.” On each subsequent album, Shiflett’s clean, melodic playing seems a perfect balance with Grohl’s straight rhythm and Pat Smear’s heavier hand.

For a guy who loves playing and touring, you’d think he’d hit the Jackpot of Rock in an outfit that offers more than enough of both. Nah – if you’ve read this far, you know better. In 2004, he got serious about writing his own songs and started what most press called a “side project,” the California power-pop group Jackson United, which put out two albums praised for their straight-up rock sensibility and Shiflett’s knowing way with a hook. Musoscribe wrote, “Jackson United strikes a perfect balance between grit/grime/grunge and spit-and-polish. On close listening, one finds that the multiple guitar lines are always doing something interesting, not merely bashing out the basic chords. There’s enough variety to keep things interesting, enough consistency to keep things cohesive.”

Whether or not he’d appreciate the comparison, Shiflett is like a frenetically curious beagle led around by his ear instead of his snout. When he found himself playing next to the funnel cake booth at Orange County’s 2008 Hootenanny festival, his fond but dormant attraction to Americana, old country, and twangy guitar by the likes of Merle Haggard, Hank Williams and Willie Nelson was sparked. Within two years, he’d formed solo act Chris Shiflett and the Dead Peasants, releasing two albums of country covers before once again penning his own songs, this time in an effort to inject the genre’s sometimes down-and-out vibe with a bit of Saturday night swing. Early reviews of the eponymous single off his 2017 solo record West Coast Town (produced by the legendary Dave Cobb) indicate he’s succeeded. Rolling Stone wrote, “Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett flawlessly blends blue-collar country punk with a catchy Bakersfield bounce. Borrowing the rowdy swagger of Prison Bound-era Social Distortion and the SoCal sheen of Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam, Shiflett crafts a sound that is both geographically grounded and wholly his own. ‘West Coast Town’ authentically straddles the line between vintage country cool and the boundary-blurring spirit of modern Americana.”

Call it a side project if you will, but Shiflett’s no dabbler, and in his exploration of country, he invites us along for the ride. In 2013 he launched Walking the Floor, a weekly podcast featuring deep-dive interviews with legendary and current country musicians like Red Simpson, Dwight Yoakam, John Doe, Lucinda Williams, Brad Paisley and Cody Jinks. If the occasional boxer or filmmaker slips in, it’s simply because Shifflet is interested. In writing about the podcast, Pop Matters praised his natural curiosity. “That [Shiflett] comes from what is ostensibly the other side of the musical tracks leads to a fascinating dynamic once the mics are on. He may be a rock guitar hero to countless kids around the globe, but it’s evident that he holds the same admiration and appreciation of the artists he interviews…He allows his guests to tell their stories on their terms. What happens is frequently magical and always illuminating.”

When you’re part of a rock juggernaut like Foo Fighters, maybe it’s inevitable that some of your best and most passionate endeavors get labeled a side project. But if it means getting to do the only thing you’ve ever wanted to do, we’re guessing you’ll do it in small roadside bars or giant stadiums and be pretty happy in either place. Who wouldn’t be, when you’re having such a damned good time?

Watching Elisabeth Moss as Mad Men’s sec-turned-exec Peggy Olson (as millions did for 88 addictive episodes) and in recent projects like Top of the Lake, High Rise and Queen of Earth, you’d be forgiven for assuming she’s a capital-S Serious or capital-M Method artist. Even director Jane Campion might’ve drawn the same conclusion from Moss’ Top of Lake audition tape. “It was remarkable…I just found myself really interested in watching this gentle, quiet, obviously interior performance. At the end of about six hours, I was still really interested. She’s a little bit like a Mona Lisa. There’s a lot that she’s not showing you.”

It’s an impression Moss sometimes wishes were true, but acknowledges that capital-C Class Clown is more apt. (That was, in fact, the title unanimously bestowed by her Mad Men cast mates). So much for our illusions. As she told The Guardian in 2016, “I wish I was super-serious, anguished. I see those actors and think, God, they are so cool and seem so interesting. I don’t take acting that seriously.” But she does it seriously. Tales from several sets support her seeming ability to perform the acting equivalent of doing zero to 60 for a scene without ever appearing to bear down on the gas. “I was shocked at how quickly she metabolized the material,” Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner once marveled. “She is that kind of actress where we don’t ever intellectually delve into what is going on with her character. It’s almost like it doesn’t pass through Elisabeth’s brain. It’s completely instinctive. She works hard, but I think she also works hard to hide it. Either that, or she’s an alien.” Weiner may deal in alternative facts, but we’re going with the former, which begs the unanswerable question, what is instinct anyway?

That’s probably not something an eight-year-old thinks much about. Moss just liked playing the TV roles she started getting at that age. But she also liked dancing, studying ballet seriously while being homeschooled as she pursued both. She earned her GED at 16 and decided acting offered the more physically enduring career option. She worked steadily in supporting film and TV parts like Girl, Interrupted and Picket Fences before being cast as first daughter Zoey Bartlet on West Wing. That led to Weiner’s casting her in Mad Men, which subsequently led to six Emmy nods and fame as an unintentional feminist icon.

As Peggy Olson grew in confidence and complexity, her character’s storyline grew more compelling, rivaling Don Draper’s for our interest. If making us believe and champion Peggy’s huge personal and professional transformation is an accomplishment, an even bigger one is emerging from a seven-season national TV phenomenon without being forever identified with or pigeonholed by it. But even before the show ended, Moss told The Telegraph UK, “I think it’s up to you as an actor to make choices that are different, to stretch your ability, to not get too comfortable doing something you know you can do. Of course, if you play one character for five years, people are going to think of you as that character. But you can break out of that.”

Can, and did. If viewers weren’t quite ready to move on, Moss was. She’s since chosen a string of largely independent projects that allow her to tell stories as diverse and interesting as the women in them. You’ll find virtually enslaved housewives (High Rise) single-minded detectives (Top Of Lake) and mourning, possibly unhinged vacationers (Queen Of Earth). Harder to find is a bad review. Just one of way too many to list is The New York Times’ take on the latter. “It is Ms. Moss, with her intimate expressivity, who annihilates you from first tear to last crushing laugh.” In addition to landing an emotional punch, she has a talent for landing herself in stories that regardless of time period or milieu are strikingly relevant to current times. None more so, unfortunately, than The Handmaid’s Tail, Hulu’s excellent and much buzzed-about adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel.

On the off chance you’re not convinced of her versatility – or guts – know that when Moss decided to try the stage for the first time in 18 years of acting, she did it on Broadway, in Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, no less. And there was The Heidi Chronicles. While you could argue there’s no one better suited to play its evolving, wisecracking proto-feminist lead, taking on an iconic 1989 role and making it resonate in 2015 is a gamble. It paid off with a Tony nod and raves from noted theater critic Charles Isherwood, who called Moss “a superb actor who possesses the unusual ability to project innocence and smarts at the same time.”

High praise, but as far as Moss is concerned, Get Him to the Greek is as valid a choice as the largely improvised indie The One I Love, if it makes her a better actor. Whether that’s possible is debatable, but what’s not is this: More than ever, we need stories about heroic, flawed and completely believable women, and few actors play them better.

The red carpet has always been a challenging place for Colin Hanks. The blinding white fusillade of incoming camera fire induces watering eyes and vertigo, and he finds the scrum and shouting of press, publicists and onlookers a bit disorienting. He’s not ungrateful to be there; it’s just that by nature, he’s a guy who learns and practices his craft calmly, consistently and without much fanfare. Maybe that’s why he’s kind of snuck up on us in plain sight, doing work that just gets better and more interesting as he goes along.

Hanks has always seen himself as more journeyman than star. “I was just more about [doing] the lunch-pail and-thermos-kind-of-work,” he once told Deadline. Indeed, he’s punched in regularly since grade school when he started doing class plays. He continued in high school and college at Loyola Marymount University, where he decided on an acting career basically by default – it was simply more fun than anything else he was doing at the time. He left college and began auditioning.

His first break was on the 1999 WB teen sci-fi drama Roswell, a role Hollywood lore has it that he landed without producers seeing his headshot or knowing his dad was a guy named Tom. His big break came two years later with the independent feature Orange County in a role that seemed perfect – a good, straight kid whose college dreams are thrown into chaos by the loony adults around him. Even as his perplexity and alarm increases, he remains an anchor for the more frenetic (i.e. Jack Black) actors around him. It was a performance that dismissed any claims of nepotism or entitlement. Roger Ebert’s review ran, “If your father is a famous actor, you may be able to get hired as an intern or an assistant still photographer, or get an acting job in a TV series. If you’re making a feature on your own, it’s because somebody with money thought you were right for the job. In this case, somebody was right.”

Too right, maybe. It begat job offers, but Hanks wasn’t much interested in trivial teen movies, or in repeating himself. As a result, offers slowed. It helps that he seems to possess a genetic immunity to angst. Sean McGinly, who directed Hanks in 2008’s The Great Buck Howard, recalled his sangfroid in the face of the pressures of the business. “He takes it all in stride. Colin is one of the more calm and un-neurotic actors I’ve come across, and he has a lot more reasons to be neurotic than many of my friends who are tortured actors.” Hanks put his head down, worked as often as he could, while carving his own path, which included a 2009 Broadway staging of Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations with Jane Fonda. The New York Times and The Washington Post larded reviews of his performance with “winning” and “charming,” and The Observer wrote, “Mr. Hanks quietly shines onstage, with a loose-limbed lanky warmth and comic timing that holds your gaze, even among an impressive cast. He’s clearly having a ball up there, and it is infectious.” How could a lifelong theater geek not be having a ball?

As Hanks once put it, “I’m not Captain America.” Knowing he wasn’t a tent-pole kind of guy, he looked for different, more interesting projects; increasingly, they seemed to be found on television There was his turn as a conflicted priest on Mad Men, and as a (way) against type psychotic killer on Dexter. And most notably, his reluctant policeman-turned-mailman Gus Grimley on FX’s Fargo, which earned high praise from both critics and series creator Noah Hawley. “Colin was born to play this role – it really shows what he is capable of. He’s got that impossible-to-quantify likability, but he’s never been put through his paces like this.” He received an Emmy nod for his trouble, demonstrating in the process a certain still, observational quality not always on display in the comedic panic and energy he’s been praised for in his CBS series Life In Pieces, now in its third season.

But as Hanks continued to evolve as a player in fictional stories, he become more interested in telling real ones. And he’s good at it. In his first documentary, All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records, he set out to tell the story of the iconic retailer with all the passion of a music lover and pride of a Sacramento native. Getting financing on the heels of the 2008 financial collapse proved fruitless, so he did it himself through Kickstarter, ultimately the perfect way to make a film for and by the people whose lives the music mecca was such a big part of. Its warm critical reception went beyond the film and music press, Fast Company noting, “Hanks explores not just the cultural impact of Tower (and the record store as a business model), but also the impact that it had on the people involved. What could be a simple documentary retreading the well-told narratives about the cultural shifts that ended days of physical media, in Hanks’s hands, is a character study of people who built and transformed a culture – at least for a little while.”

That film took seven years to make. He had seven months and a skeleton crew to make his second. Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis is a chilling but ultimately uplifting account of the group’s return to Paris after the terrorist attack at the Bataclan Theater. Again, his storytelling was astute. Billboard wrote, “Hanks takes a deliberately non-fussy approach, utilizing close-ups to capture his subjects’ emotions; he lets the story unfold with the band’s own words, using no narration.”

If he seems to do his best work by stealth, don’t discount it. It would be pretty easy to bask in the family glow or constantly play the affable good guy; instead, he does what challenges and interests him, and does it his own way. In Hank’s case, it’s proving to be the best way.

When a 16-year old Ron Howard was hanging out on set with Henry Fonda (as one does), Fonda gave the young actor a bit of advice: If he loved acting, he should focus on theater, but, “If you love movies, become a director.” Ron Howard loved movies.

The Oklahoma-born son of two actors, his earliest memories are of memorizing dialog from his dad’s summer stock plays as a 3-year old. Walking unaware into an MGM kids’ casting call in 1959, Howard senior mentioned he had a son who was a fine actor. They called young Ronny in, had him do a scene, and asked his dad if he could do anything else. “I really don’t know if he can.” Ron Howard entered our living rooms a year later as Opie in The Andy Griffith Show, and didn’t leave for the next 25 years when Happy Days ended in 1984. That’s when we really saw what else he could do.

He started directing in 1977 by convincing producer Roger Corman to let him helm Grand Theft Auto (Howard agreed to act in Corman’s Eat My Dust! in exchange). Next came Night Shift, and then, at a point where most directors are still paying off film school debt, he delivered Splash, Cocoon and Parenthood. They were all charming, funny, well reviewed and commercially successful; and yet we still hadn’t seen the extent of what he could do as a director.

What Howard excels at is telling stories that tell us something about ourselves; real tales of real people – albeit writ large – whose lives and worlds double as themes he wants to explore: family, teamwork, hubris and adversity, to name a few. Another particular genius is his ability to translate those worlds visually, forging a direct connection from our eyeballs to our gut or heart, as the story demands. Consider a tale that takes place largely inside the head of a brilliant but unstable mathematician. In its review of A Beautiful Mind, The New York Times called his technique “as simple as it is inspired,” adding, “Mr. Howard has found an accessible cinematic way to present this insight: Schizophrenia does not announce itself as such to those it afflicts. Mr. Howard leads us into its infernal reality without posting a sign on the door.” The film, an unexpected success, earned him an Academy Award for Best Director.

When he took us into Formula One racing with Rush, a lot of people went along reluctantly, only to be surprised at how one tight shot of a violently vibrating tire could make their heart race as fast as the motor shaking it. That shot signaled danger more effectively than any deadly crash. Variety thought so, too. “To witness this level of storytelling skill (applied to a subject only a fraction of the public inherently finds interesting) is to marvel at not only what cinema can do when image, sound and score are so artfully combined to suggest vicarious experience, but also to realize how far Howard has come since his directorial debut.”

He was able to make equally dramatic cinema from two men sitting across from each other, talking. “You expect something dry, historical and probably contrived. But you get a delicious contest of wits, brilliant acting and a surprisingly gripping narrative,” said the Washington Post about Frost/Nixon. “Howard’s cinematic treatment deftly exploits very conventional narrative techniques without one ever being quite aware of them.”

But of course the film that feels closest to his core as a filmmaker is Apollo 13. It has it all: exploration, heroism, history and the compelling factor of being true. Noting that the subject matter demanded Howard’s reverential treatment, the Los Angeles Times called it his most impressive film to date in a 1995 review. “Howard’s willingness to be straight ahead with his directing, the film’s derring-do aspects have the advantage of showing the men simply being heroic as opposed to acting like heroes.”

If some critics have made cynical dismissals of a perceived gee-whiz, all-American, hero-worshipping aesthetic, Howard makes no apologies. “I’m drawn toward celebratory stories. I feel that they are every bit as valid and useful as the darker, cautionary tales. And my favorite thing is when the celebration is not up front and in your face, but something that evolves. It’s something you can understand, that flawed characters can be a part of moments that are worthy of celebration and respect.” That’s sounding pretty good to us these days.

Howard’s work continues to follow his fascinations, from the depths (In the Heart of the Sea) to music (Made in America, The Beatles: Eight Days a week) to boxing (Cinderella Man). We explore along with him again in National Geographic’s first-ever scripted series Genius. His new anthology drama chronicles the world’s most brilliant innovators, kicking off with the famous physicist Albert Einstein. In it, and all of his work, Howard approaches his subjects with eye of a historian, a fan, a geek, and a loving adherent to detail.

So, how to summarize the life’s work of someone whose 63-year career spans two Golden Ages of Television and some of the most acclaimed and successful movies of every genre? Fortunately we don’t have to; it’s still very much in progress.

If you’ve watched Veep’s depressing and hilarious press secretary Mike McLintock struggle to keep his administration out of hot water, it’s easy to see why Matt Walsh received an Emmy nod for his work on the show. But if that’s where you came into the picture, you’ve witnessed only the tip of a very funny iceberg.

Walsh is so connected in the comedy world he’s become a virtual Zelig of droll, double-take film and TV appearances; but any footprints he’s left on those projects will remain dwarfed by the crater-like impression he’s made as a founder of the legendary Upright Citizens Brigade. In that regard, he’s not only marked our modern comedy world, he’s literally helped create it.

Not that he had any idea he was doing something so influential when he, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts and Matt Besser founded UCB in 1993. “We had no real plan, we were just doing shows and wanted a clubhouse.” Okay, it was a converted strip club, but never mind that – it became an iconic showcase, school and launch pad for ultra-talented, under-exposed performers like Aziz Ansari, Ellie Kemper, Nick Kroll, Ed Helms, Donald Glover and Kate McKinnon. Most of them have less than six degrees of separation from UCB and Walsh, making him sort of a Kevin Bacon of sketch and improv (or Kevin Beeken, for purveyors of inside jokes).

Though he was bitten by the funny bug in a variety show at his Chicago high school, Walsh graduated college as a psychology major and worked in an adolescent psych ward after graduation. But nights spent studying improv with Del Close convinced him he wasn’t long for the day job. He began making his name (and finding his voice) at the Improv Olympic in 1989, eventually meeting fellow comics that would become the UCB Founding Four. Walsh was so committed to the cause he left a prestigious gig with Second City to continue building the struggling troupe, using money from side jobs to stay afloat.

In 1998 UCB scored a three-year show on Comedy Central. Splitsider called The UCB Show “a show for comedy nerds, people who care about whether and why a sketch works with near-academic intensity.” It opened the floodgates to a parade of TV roles – on The Daily Show, Reno 911!, Party Down, Community, Parks and Recreation, to name a very few – and in movies like Drillbit Taylor, Step Brothers, Cyrus and 2016’s Ghostbusters. He’s also a consistent figure in Todd Phillips movies, where you’ll find him playing characters named Walsh, or ‘Valsh,’ as the situation demands.

Along the way, Walsh (the real one) also managed to write and direct several of his own projects, which are notable for being almost 100 percent improvised, and bold examples of alternative comedy. As an actor and writer on Players, he transformed loosely outlined situations and characters into surprisingly watchable TV, largely due to a cast of improv pros who knew how to lift and level the jokes. In its review of the pilot for his Dog Bites Man, IGN wrote, “If subsequent episodes of the show maintain this level of quality, this is going to be one of the best comedies on television. The chemistry of the cast is amazing, the writing is sharp and witty, and the timing is perfect.” On the big screen, he’s gathered improv cohorts for cult classics like High Road and Martin & Orloff, the latter in which he is Martin Flam, an advertising costume designer who is agonizing over the death of an actor dressed as an egg roll with no eye holes, who stumbled into the river and drowned. Guilt-stricken, he attempts suicide; the movie starts with Flam’s return home from the hospital as he cleans his own dried blood from the bathroom floor. If that intro alone has you sniggering to yourself, maybe you’ll sympathize with tech issues Walsh encounters in turning his friends loose in front of a lens. When the cameras keep shaking and lights start moving around because the crew can’t stop laughing, you’re in for a long day of shooting, but he loves every minute of it. In discussing High Road with Collider, Walsh cited Christopher Guest as inspiration. “He got to make four movies with his buddies. That alone is a huge success to me.”

If Veep is only now bringing him attention he’s more than merited all along, you get the feeling he’ll use it for the same purpose he always has – championing comics. He believes they have a harder job than they’re given credit for in comparison to their dramatic counterparts. “Comedians have to be relatable, so the pedestal gets smaller.” Hopefully not too small to accommodate a guy who truly deserves one.

Freida Pinto didn’t rise to fame as much as she instantly found herself in its spotlight. It’s a story almost more Hollywood than Hollywood – kind of like the one in the small film that started it all. Set and filmed in India, Slumdog Millionaire emerged as a surprise sleeper, grossing nearly four hundred million dollars on a budget of only $15 million. It was the most successful film of 2008, winning eight of its ten Academy Award nominations. It was also the first film Pinto ever made. She had a mere 20 minutes of screen time (and no formal acting training) to convince viewers she was a girl worth crawling across the earth for. First she had to convince director Danny Boyle, sort of. He saw hundreds of girls on videotape, but “The first time I saw her audition, I remember thinking, ‘Well, that’s her.’” It was.

The ironic part was that it took a British filmmaker and an American studio to launch the career of someone who’d grown up in Mumbai, the capital of Bollywood, which regularly outpaces its U.S. industry counterpart in production spending, ticket sales – and competition for roles. The daughter of a banker and school principal who was never going to become either, Pinto was keen to act from an early age. Seeing her country’s pride in Sushmita Sen’s 1994 Miss Universe win, she wanted to inspire her nation’s admiration as well. She went to college (English literature, psychology, economics), but Charlize Theron put her over the edge. Watching 2003’s Monster, Pinto knew she had to find such transformational opportunities for herself. She modeled to finance auditions, scoring chewing gum and phone commercials and even a travel show for India’s Zee channel – while film rejections piled up.

What audition after audition couldn’t do for her in Bollywood, Slumdog did overnight. She quickly landed roles in films by some of the businesses’ most iconic directors, including Woody Allen, Michael Winterbottom and Terrence Malick. There’s your acting school right there. What seemed to elude them was knowing exactly what to do with her. Pinto’s roles in smaller movies (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Knight of Cups) and larger blockbusters (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Blunt Force Trauma) seemed underwritten and one-dimensional.

The exceptions were small, but revelatory films. In Trishna, the India-set adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, we saw what Slumdog hinted at. “The movie is dominated by the performances of the beautiful Freida Pinto…and Riz Ahmed,” ran The Guardian’s review. “Both are actors with striking presences playing people uncertain of their identities, discontented with their lots and seething with doubts about their roles in evolving India.” As the lead in Julian Schnabel’s biographical, political Miral, she won praise for her performance as an orphaned Palestinian woman who grew up in a refugee camp in Israel, but its most profound effect on her was personal, as she told Interview in 2011. “There was a lot I had to learn, because all the news channels say is, ‘Israeli soldiers’ and ‘Palestinian terrorists’ — we’ve already compartmentalized them.” In describing the film, she said, “There are people who are trying to make a difference in a very civil manner, not just by picking up a gun. I felt that if I became part of this film and I gave it my all, that’s exactly what I would be doing…I knew the film was not going to be accepted too well, but I did it hoping that somewhere in the future it would be referred to as one of those films that started the conversation.”

She’s determined to continue it, spending half her time advocating for women and children around the globe, working with organizations like We Do It Together and Because I’m A Girl, and being a producer on the devastating and controversial India’s Daughter. “It’s definitely not a career decision. It’s more of a human decision.” That said, the career decisions are holding their own. She’s recently joined Idris Elba and Babou Ceesay in Showtime’s Guerrilla as a woman whose values are tested when she liberates a political prisoner in 1970s London. She’ll also appear in Love Sonia, a tough film about the global sex trafficking trade, and in next year’s Jungle Book: Origins, which is already giving off franchise whiffs.

If the business was unable to figure out her “place,” well, lucky her. When you belong nowhere, you can go anywhere, a feat few “ethnic” actresses manage to accomplish. She’s played women of all nationalities and religions; she’s been eye candy, heroine, muse and badass, all without ever being confined to a type. Perfect, for someone who’s said she rather enjoys being an outsider. “I don’t want to be fitted in somewhere. I fit into the world. I’m a human being before anything else.”

Not everyone is born with a complete set of parts. Some people are missing a fifth toe or a sense of smell. Jenny Slate appears to have materialized with no discernable sense of shame or filter. That’s a drawback if you’re, say, a president, but a real plus if you’re a comedian. You can follow your uncensored brain out loud without much worry wherever it takes you; in Slate’s case, that’s places both wild and mundane, each fertile ground for amusement. “If your brain is going the way that my brain goes, everything is cast in a comedic light. Everything is funny and most people are really funny.” Her humor has less to do what’s going on around her than what’s going on inside her head, which seems like a very interesting place to be.

Slate’s comedy goggles were never rose-colored, though, and that’s likely what led to her breakout film role in 2014’s Obvious Child, “a comedy about abortion.” It followed the life of a young standup comic as she grapples with an unplanned pregnancy and eventual abortion, and was widely acclaimed, with Slate’s performance especially praised. If Slate’s balanced and relatable performance surprised critics and just about everyone else who saw it, they can’t be blamed. If they knew of her prior to that film, it was from sitcom appearances, comic voice work, Late Night sketches and Saturday Night Live, where (besides a famous f-bomb) she was best known for impressions (Hota Kotb, Lady Gaga, Kristen Stewart) and characters like Tina-Tina Cheneuse, home shopping purveyor of personalized doorbells, alarm clocks and car horns.

Dig into the toy box of any really funny person, and you’ll almost always find more than characters and jokes. Piled beneath them are smarts and curiosity, and often a middle child with a need for attention. Slate and her older and younger sisters were born in Milton, Massachusetts to poet/author Ron Slate and Nancy, a ceramicist. After graduating (as valedictorian, no less) from Milton Academy, she entered Columbia University as a literature major, where she met her other (comic) half, Gabe Liedman. In 2008 they launched Big Terrific with Max Silvestri, performing standup shows in the back bar of the Williamsburg record store Sound Fix. Over its seven-year run, it emerged as the best comedy show in the city, partly due to guests like Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, and Aziz Ansari, but mostly due its founders, whose comedy Vulture called “individually and consistently hilarious.” She followed that with her one-woman UCB show, Jenny Slate: Dead Millionaire.

The farther Slate’s imaginings stray from conventional comedy platforms, the more odd and wonderful they get. In 2013 there was her web series Catherine, which Hollywood.com tried valiantly to define. “Frightfully mundane – there’s no other way to aptly describe the kooky series besides smashing two opposing adjectives together and hoping it all makes sense. Catherine goes to work, talks to co-workers, orders bread and butter sandwiches, and… that’s pretty much it. But it’s oddly fascinating. It’s an odd experiment in comedy and tone…but paired with subtle musical cues, everything begins to feel really creepy, like something is seriously wrong with these people.”

And then, of course, there’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, a stop-motion film created in her apartment with director Dean Fleischer-Camp. Slate voices the anthropomorphic seashell, who despite being outfitted with a creepy single Oobi eye and a pair of miniature shoes, is absolutely adorable. In pseudo documentary style, Slate improvises Marcel’s dialog as he discusses his activities, hobbies, hopes, and disappointments. It won AFI Film Fest’s Best Animated Short and the Grand Jury and Audience Awards at the New York International Children’s Film Festival, not to mention tens of millions of views on YouTube. Studio offers rolled in, complete with merchandising opportunities, which Slate is tabling until marketers agree to make plush toys no larger than Marcel actually is (he’s quite tiny – what would you expect from a chap who wears a lentil for a hat?).

Last year she and her father co-authored About the House, sharing family memories, quirks, and confessions in a singular collection of stories, essays, and poems about their (possibly haunted) family home. She kicked off this year by playing a woman figuring out her family, her marriage and herself in Landline, which Collider called “a reminder that Slate should be leading way more movies by herself.” Coming up are Polka King with Jack Black and the more somber Gifted opposite Chris Evans. And that’s just this spring.

Maybe Slate moves so fast to keep up with her frenetic talents, or perhaps to keep anyone from putting too specific a finger on them. Or maybe it’s simpler. As Marcel says, “Really, what you just have to do is take a ride.” We call shotgun.

After being singled out by fate (and Brian De Palma) for a small part in a big video, it looked like Courteney Cox might be forever known as the Girl Who Danced with Bruce Springsteen. But those 30 some-odd seconds were an unimagined launch pad for the 20-year-old Birmingham native who abandoned architecture to pursue modeling and acting. The breaks followed quickly, first with commercials and soap operas, then parts on TV series like Misfits of Science, Family Ties and Seinfeld. Movies opened up next. Masters of the Universe, Mr. Destiny and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective were coveted opportunities for someone starting out, even if they did make more use of her looks than her talent and didn’t raise her profile as much as that of her male co-stars.

Returning to TV seemed like a good way to maintain visibility, so ten years after being The Boss’ most famous dance partner she auditioned for the role of Rachel Green on a new series called (among many other things at first) Friends. She was cast instead as Monica Geller, and along with the rest of the cast, became a pop culture phenomenon. Friends ran for ten seasons, had 62 primetime Emmy nods and hit the biggest mass entertainment sweet spot of the 90s. Did it continue to be popular in the aughts? Well, its series finale in 2004 had 52.5 million viewers in America alone. What’s more, it somehow continues to resonate. New York magazine noted last year that, “the central pleasure of watching Friends — the feeling of being cosseted in a familiar place, free of worries, surrounded by friends — has never been quite so longed-for as it is now.”

But Friends, and Cox’ part in it, was important in other ways. As co-star Lisa Kudrow told Vanity Fair in 2012, “Courteney was the best known of all of us, and she had guest starred on Seinfeld. She said, “Listen, I just did a Seinfeld, and they all help each other.” Several seasons later, the cast would become the first to use solidarity as leverage in salary negotiations. The show also gave Cox the long-awaited chance to prove that beautiful women could also be funny.

A ten-year reputation as one of the most likeable women ever on TV is something most actors would guard with their life when looking around for their next gig. Cox chose Dirt. USA Today wrote, “It’s brave of Cox to choose such an unsympathetic character for her post-Friends TV return.” Cox just thought playing a cynical tabloid editor would be a fun change of pace – if not a sort of meta-jab at the paparazzi that had become a permanent fixture in her life by then.

Bill Lawrence, who found her to be “comedically fearless” when he cast her in a three-episode arc on Scrubs, offered her the lead in Cougar Town. Her comic chops were in full evidence on screen, but a lot of the humor (and Cox’ is on the ironic side) stems just from her choice to do the show. A real life example of the media obsession with looks, aging, and how women deal with it, Cox made herself the primetime fictional subject of it as well. As the camera pans the show’s landscape of Botoxed, bleached, low-cut-spandex-clad 40-somethings in an opening episode, Cox, as Jules Cobb, says to a friend, “I know I’m one of them, I just don’t feel like one of them.” Off screen, she was honing her talents as a director on several episodes. Cox seems to have split vision – one eye trained on the job at hand, the other on what’s next.

While continuing to act in films, she also began directing them. There was Talhotblond, based on a real-life story about an internet obsession that leads to familial disconnection and eventually murder. The Huffington Post wrote, “Cox paces the film slowly, letting the jeopardy of the situation build. There are many close calls and Cox presents them in a way that makes this movie full of nerve-breaking suspense.” And in 2014, she made the black comedy Just Before I Go. The Los Angeles Times praised her juggling of genuine emotion and raunchy humor, noting, “Cox steers this tricky ship with a deft hand and a strong sense of timing, comic and otherwise.”

She’s also directed music videos, and has two new TV series in the works, both of which she is executive producing. While Cox has always denied she’s as OCD as her famous alter ego, there is a sense of restlessness about her. She seems perpetually dissatisfied in the best, self-challenging way. No doubt she’ll be indelibly (and deservedly) remembered as Monica, but what’s most exciting is everything she’s yet to be known for.

Hank Azaria’s relationship to the most iconic cartoon of a generation is a question of prepositions. He is indisputably on The Simpsons (his voice work on the show has won him four Emmys); also, he is The Simpsons – or at least a good percentage of the regulars that populate their world: Moe the Bartender, Apu the Kwik-E-Mart proprietor, Chief Wiggum, Comic Book Guy, The Sea Captain, Carl Carlson, as well as a one-man army of walk-ons like Cletus Spuckler, Professor Frink, Dr. Nick Riviera, Lou, Snake Jailbird, Superintendent Chalmers, Disco Stu, Duffman and the Wiseguy.

A gifted mimic at five, Azaria had no idea his impressions were an unusual talent. “I just loved Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Then when I got old enough to realize it was all the same guy, Mel Blanc, I lost my mind.” Memorizing comedy routines he saw and doing funny voices remained a diversion while he was growing up in Queens, NY, but became an obsession once he did a high school play. He decided on acting and studied drama at Tufts University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Apparently not an optimist, he’s said he didn’t expect to be successful as a professional actor, but determined to hang on until he was 25 just so he wouldn’t regret not trying.

His path proceeded along the standard Hollywood lines – a move to L.A., work as a catering bartender and plenty of auditions. His debut was in the 1986 ABC series Bash, a one-line part he told all his friends about, only to discover it was cut. But a little humiliation is a small price to pay for a SAG card, right? Parts in sitcoms like Family Ties and Growing Pains followed, as did Hollywood Dog, his first-ever voice role. The pilot failed, but prompted a casting director to ask him to audition for Moe. Simpsons exec producer Matt Groening kept asking him back, a rogues gallery of voices was compiled, and a stable career was born.

Live action work picked up around the same time with recurring roles on Friends and Mad About You. A small part in Pretty Woman was his first feature film; subsequent roles soon became bigger and more diverse – Quiz Show, Along Came Polly, Dodgeball, Cradle Will Rock, Night At the Museum, Godzilla – but none more memorable than Agador – Spartacus – in The Birdcage. As a dialed-to-eleven Guatemalan houseboy, he made us laugh harder than the movie’s stars, comic icons Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.

Every industry has a “guy” – the one you go to when you want the reliable best in the business, and Azaria became the go-to for making any line funny just by saying it. Playwright Jenelle Riley said, “[Azaria’s] appeal can best be summed up by, of all things, his hilarious cameo in the goofy comedy Dodgeball. As Patches O’Houlihan, he delivers a pitch-perfect performance in an instructional video in which he chain-smokes, encourages a child to pick on those weaker than him, and steals the film from a cast of comedic greats. It’s a wonderful, odd moment that could have failed miserably in the hands of a lesser actor, and he manages to pull it off with only seconds of dialogue…Pound for pound, Hank Azaria is the best actor working today.” Azaria humbly passes most of it off to “dumb celebrity impressions,” but that’s dismissing the work of a master mixologist. Patches O’Houlihan? “Essentially a bad Clark Gable impression, but I tried to add some young Rip Torn in it.” Moe? Al Pacino, with some gravel thrown in. Agador? Puerto Rican street queens, tempered with his grandmother. Apu? Peter Sellers in The Party. We’ll end the list there so as not to ruin a potentially amusing Azaria-watching parlor game for you.

Those indelible characters can make it easy to overlook Azaria’s fine dramatic work in series like Huff and Ray Donovan, and his touching AOL series Fatherhood. Variety called his Emmy-winning performance as Mitch Albom in Tuesdays with Morrie “the most layered and sensitive work of his career.” As it often happens, genius work in one arena overshadows equal work in another. As they say, it’s a blessing and a curse. In his new IFC dark comedy Brockmire, Azaria is a famed major league baseball announcer who suffers an embarrassing public meltdown live on the air and decides to reclaim his career in a small rust belt town calling games for a minor league team called the Morristown Frackers. So mostly, a blessing.

Maggie Siff was born and raised in the Bronx by a Jewish father and an Irish mother, but always felt more “culturally Jewish.” If that sometimes resulted in typecasting, she didn’t mind. In fact, when she was called to read for the part of Peggy Olson on Mad Men, she asked to read for department store heiress Rachel Menken Katz instead. She saw such women as intelligent, strong, direct – and still sensual. Smart choice. The role brought her to L.A., and changed her life and career.

After a year on Mad Men, she landed her first major TV role on Sons of Anarchy, another show that started off with a cult fan base (albeit of a slightly different ilk) and subsequently ballooned in popularity. She described her character, Tara Knowles-Teller, as “a bridge for the audience. She represents the person with the more normative job situation and a morality that people relate to more.” But as a doctor who tries – and dramatically fails – to extricate herself from the motorcycle club world of her husband, she also became half of a rivalry that divided viewers so strongly that Siff had to stop reading fan boards for a while. Though critics agreed she was one of the best actors on the show, her character was killed off in season six (hey, you’re lucky to last six seasons in television these days).

Around the same time, film work started coming along in smaller features like Michael Clayton, Push, Concussion and a brief but philosophical turn as Rabbi Zimmerman in the acclaimed Leaves of Grass. Recently the roles have gotten more complicated and meaningful, perhaps none more so than Anna Baskin, an exhausted, workaholic 40-something actress who abruptly flees a successful but intolerably boring TV role, returning to her past life in New York to reinvent herself in the indie A Woman, A Part. The Hollywood Reporter praised her handling of the tricky role, which intrigued Siff with its parallels to her own life and some issues she understood as an actor in L.A. “There is just an ocean of roles and scripts that you’re sort of reading through that are really trite and redundant. There are a lot of tropes for women you encounter over and over again, depending on your type,” she told IndieWire. When you read something that’s actually got depth and warmth and feels real, it almost feels like a shock to the system.”

By nature or will, Siff has held onto some principles that the business can loosen one’s grip on. She stays open to opportunities that surprise and mystify her; she’s her own devil’s advocate, analyzing her choices to make sure she’s taking parts for the right reasons. And, she looks for roles that allow her to bore into who she is versus how she looks. In a Huffington Post interview, she said, “I don’t want to just play a role that is subjugated to a small corner of a romantic nook of a world…I’m just looking for interesting, complicated, unusual roles.”

She’s hit the interesting-complicated-unusual trifecta with Showtime’s Billions. How else to describe Wendy Rhoades, a psychiatrist and motivational coach for hedge fund power players by day, and wife to a U.S. Attorney General by night. She’s a woman who enjoys not only dealing with huge egos, but more often than not, holding all the cards. Siff has said she likes playing the characters that can swim with the sharks, male or female. Watching Siff navigate those waters, it also appears she’s having some fun with the dialog which The Guardian called “so fast and so smart, it makes the characters in The West Wing sound monosyllabic.”

Not surprisingly, she’s eager to do more independent film and get her hands into other areas of the process. Sounds like another smart choice. As great as she is in Billions, we have a feeling that the projects that truly match her capabilities as an artist are still in front of her. So as they say in therapy, let’s explore that.

For a comedian of notoriously low-key style, Jerrod Carmichael knows how to make an entrance. His debut HBO comedy special, Jerrod Carmichael: Love at the Store, also happened to be his first-ever stand-up TV performance, and the first for which The Comedy Store’s legendary Original Room permitted cameras inside. Oh yeah, and it was directed by Spike Lee, and the DP was Matthew Libatique, who shot Black Swan and Iron Man. Carmichael was 26. His delivery is casual – he’s known to bring notebooks on stage and abandon lines mid-act if he decides they don’t work – but his jokes have all the languor of a heat-seeking missile. Some of them rattled even Lee, who suggested he not do his Trayvon Martin riff in the film – advice Carmichael politely declined to heed.

So how does a 20 year-old who never did standup before moving to L.A. from North Carolina command that kind of attention, not to mention his own network TV show a few years later? Out of context, it seems incredible. With some backstory, you might’ve seen it coming. Despite coming from a neighborhood that could be tough (two of his friends were murdered, some sold drugs) and low on access to cutting-edge entertainment, Carmichael was an autodidact, with parents who fostered debates about entertainment, religion and politics. The boys he hung out with did funny shows for girls in the neighborhood, and in school, he learned what it felt like to hold (if not win) a room. He also learned that his largely minority, under-funded school system wasn’t going to get him where he needed to be. In his mind, that was L.A., opening for guys like Louis C.K. Once he decided standup was an option, he figured that’s where he should be.

And that’s where he ended up, working small standup clubs and showcases. He got his big break playing Garf in Neighbors; when you nimbly steal scenes from Seth Rogen and Zac Efron in your first feature movie, people notice. For all the auditions that opened up for him, he walked out of quite a few. Carmichael seems artistically incapable of taking any roles that don’t feel right just to get his name out there.

It’s getting out there anyway, even if it doesn’t always go down easy. Chappelle Show creator Neal Brennan said, ‘‘at its best, Jerrod’s standup shows America/humanity at its worst — capitalist, cutthroat, cynical, narcissistic.’’ If his disarming, cheerful delivery adds to our discombobulation, it also powers the laughs – most of the time.

In a major 2016 profile, The New York Times Magazine wrote, “At work here is a fundamental reconsideration of a joke teller’s function: With Carmichael, the goal is not only to orchestrate a series of raucous eruptions — signaling, as they do, a simpatico mind meld with the audience — but to generate rifts of displeasure, confusion and anger too.” If his tendency to punch down induces some queasiness in his audience or provokes critics to label him a race-traitor, his intent is to rattle us out of our assumed worldview.

Following that line of thought, consider his new NBC sitcom The Carmichael Show, in which no topic is off limits for his fictional opinionated family, including Carmichael’s old-school father, Joe (David Alan Grier), his devoutly religious mother, Cynthia (Loretta Devine) and his progressive live-in girlfriend Maxine (Amber Stevens West). Through each, Carmichael raises a skeptical eyebrow without ever telling us which view to take. And this is important. It’s a standard-format, prime time sitcom…for adults. We’re invited to a conversation instead of being cudgeled with one joke after another. Maybe that’s why the great Norman Lear himself is a fan. ‘‘Jerrod helps America look at itself in the mirror. He sees the foolishness of the human condition — he understands that there is humor to be found in the darkest of places.’’

As for Carmichael, “I think there’s a responsibility as an artist to try and push in the direction you think comedy should go. The biggest thing I could do for the art that I love is keeping it art: keeping it special, keeping it honest, keeping it truthful.” Whether we like it or not.

Maybe it’s just us, but Gillian Jacobs feels like a secret everyone suddenly discovered at the same time. That would be 2009, the year she was cast as Britta Perry on NBC’s Community. In the four years prior, she’d made appearances in a few episodic TV shows and four fairly small films. Since, she’s averaged between four and six films a year. Only The New York Times would’ve made money on an early career bet back in 2006, when they wrote of her performance as a rape victim in the Off-Broadway play Cagelove, “Make sure to remember the name of Gillian Jacobs, a stunning Juilliard graduate who has the glow of a star in the making.”

Hearing her talk about her childhood, you could almost imagine her as the investment banker she said she wanted to be in first grade instead of the actress she became. She was an only child with a nice doll collection who spent a good deal of time in the company of 60-year-old-friends listening to NPR and reading books. Cat lady also sounds like a not-unpredictable outcome. But those same sexagenarians also fostered a love of plays and theater, and by the time she was eight, she’d decided she wanted to be an actress. In an effort to channel her “dramatic tendencies,” her mom enrolled her in acting classes at Pittsburg Playhouse. (Oh moms, channel if you must, but don’t you know containment is a fool’s errand?) By 11, she was dragging her parents to George Bernard Festivals and participating in the Shakespeare Monologue Contests at the Pittsburg Public Theater.

She was a good and dutiful kid (she did cut school once – to go to a museum), and on graduating high school, gained admission to Julliard. Suddenly, she was the student on probation with a faculty whose main objective seemed to be critiquing away any shred of confidence she’d ever had in herself. The biggest lesson they taught her wasn’t about acting; it was that obedience will only get you so far. Their fabulous parting gift? Convincing her she was terrible at theater. She decided she was better suited for the lowbrow world of movies and TV.

After a few episodic roles – including the requisite L&O – she went to L.A. to audition for Community, arguably the worst looking specimen in the room (flu, bad pants and a complete lack of hope will do that to a person). To creator/producer Dan Harmon, she just seemed authentic. “Gillian made me believe that my horribly written character was a real person.” It was essentially Jacob’s first comedy, and as awareness for the cult sitcom grew, so did the industry’s appreciation for her ability to combine droll sarcasm with razorblade timing. As the unpredictable, annoying and somehow sympathetic high school dropout/aspiring psychologist, she gave her character a depth remarkable among the population of 30-minute network shows. When NBC cancelled Community in 2014, there was probably only one person who wasn’t disappointed: Judd Apatow, who seized on the break in Jacob’s increasingly busy schedule (she also had a recurring role on Girls) to snatch her for his new Netflix show Love. Now starting its second season, the show’s been highly praised for its authentic look at dating. Regarding Jacob’s performance as Mickey Dobbs, a (very) flawed radio program manager, The A.V. Club made an observation that seems to apply to all of her work: “[Jacobs] makes you feel like no one else could play her part.”

But as often happens, one great show or two can often overshadow an actor’s most profound work. It’s Mike Birbiglia’s Don’t Think Twice where her exquisite, unflashy performance proves the Times’ prescience. As a talented member of an improv group struggling with ambition, success, and the fear of losing what she loves, her work is so pure and nuanced, it doesn’t dawn on you until later just how good she is. With no improv experience, she played so naturally among a cast of vets that you have to wonder if she shocked even herself.

If so, she’s not looking to stop. Like the best of artists, she wants to do what scares her. She recently directed her first film, the documentary short The Queen of Code, the real life story of Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who worked on the first computer and headed the team that was eventually responsible for the groundwork for the programming language COBOL. And you get the feeling that Jacobs will be responsible for more stories that call attention to the unheralded accomplishments of women. She’s going to have to work around Love (which has already been renewed for a third season) and two upcoming films. It took Juilliard, time and some therapy, but it feels like she’s where she’s meant to be. First grade ambitions aside, the investment is paying dividends we’ll hopefully be enjoying for a good long time.

Being known as the least nasty character on Veep, while not exactly a compliment, speaks to the unflappable, idiotic enthusiasm of Richard T. Splett, and similar qualities in Sam Richardson, who was supposed to play him for one episode and wound up a permanent cast member. Before that starts sounding like an insult, Richardson himself once told The A.V. Club that being an idiot “is my bread and butter. I am that person, and I wish people didn’t know.” Well, they know now, even if they’re not likely to agree. The Detroit Free Press called him one of the show’s comic high points, and GQ went further. “Even among competitively funny company, it’s usually the best bet to keep your eye on Richardson.”

As Splett – and comedy props to whoever came up with the last name – he is confidently incompetent and does not question the power he has in no way earned. You can’t blame him, then, for being more nonplussed than flattered when real White House staffers compliment him on the accuracy of his portrayal. And any self-deprecating comments about his own IQ aside, Richardson has one thing figured out: Nothing’s funnier than someone who’s unaware of his own blind spots.

As a kid, he made regular trips from his hometown of Detroit to visit family in Ghana. These trips, and the lack of any siblings close in age, gave him plenty of time alone to watch the everyday cast of characters around him. As a result, he’d compiled a vast grab bag of impressions before he’d even hit high school. That’s when a small disaster struck. It wasn’t until after he’d been admitted to University of Detroit Jesuit High that he realized it was an all-boys school. When a busload of girls rolled up one day to audition for a school play, one more hormonal boy discovered his love for the theater.

While still a teenager, he took comedy and improv classes with a Second City Detroit troupe. He graduated and enrolled in Wayne State University to study theater, but soon dropped out to perform full time with Second City sketch theater groups in Detroit and Chicago, where his range of characters became his comedy calling card. He set out for L.A. in 2012 and made appearances in several movies as well as episodes of The Office and Arrested Development. The move led to steady work on Veep, Detroit stills looms large in his heart; his deep, blind love for his hometown inspired his new Comedy Central show Detroiters, on which he and co-star/co-writer Tim Robinson play two local ad men whose work is not the stuff of Superbowl halftimes.

As Richardson describes it, it’s “Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper, if it was run by two idiots.” Their agency has gone “from ads for Pan Am to ads for a local wig shop.” If you question the comic potential of the premise, recall for a moment the exuberant, unsophisticated and unintentionally hilarious used car, appliance and carpet pitchmen of your own late-night TV youth. And who better than a genius at embodying those very qualities to bring them to life?

Detroiters (which has been shooting locally) is also a love letter to a city whose people and reputation seem ripe for a more balanced portrayal than what they’ve received in the news media. The bonus gift Richardson is giving us non-Detroiters is embedded in the show: Braying, antic yet somehow poignant thirty-second spots that we suspect have a stand-alone future on YouTube. As far as Richardson’s future is concerned, the safest prediction has already been made: But wait…there’s more!!

The literary critic Harold Bloom observed, “Without Shakespeare, we would not have seen ourselves as what we are.” Kenneth Lonergan also wields the mirror, minus the cinematic frills that embellish and distract from most of what passes for “character” films these days. He’d likely scoff at Bardly comparisons, but at the very least, both dramatists serve the hypothesis that as humans, we’re endlessly fascinating to ourselves. If the acclaim surrounding Lonergan’s work could be distilled to a few common points, one would surely be that he possesses one of the most acute, truth-detecting radars of any modern play or screenwriter. Tim Sanford, who’s produced some of Lonergan’s plays, said, “His understanding of character is so rich, he finds the essence of what makes people click.”

If there’s any complaint to be lodged about his projects, it may be the lag time between them, which can be long enough to render newer fans unfamiliar with some of his finest work. We trust the current buzz surrounding Manchester By the Sea, which he wrote and directed, will prompt some much-deserved rediscovery. If notoriously and self-admittedly cranky, slow, recalcitrant and prone to “always sitting home in a depression,” he is also painstaking in his adherence to the authenticity of every phrase, of every shot and cut. The small, ordinary moments that comprise his work are what hit home the hardest, only they don’t hit as much as sink in, absorbed through our porous shared experience.

Lonergan’s mom and stepdad were both psychoanalysts whose clients were (anonymously) subjects of dinner table discussion, inspiring his fascination with real people and their individual experience of the world (it also inspired the idea for Analyze This, a film he wrote solely to make money and has never seen.) He began writing plays in the ninth grade, and his play The Rennings Children, written when he was 18, was produced by the Young Playwrights Festival in 1982. His real theater breakout came 14 years later with This Is Our Youth, which was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Best Play and continues to be regularly staged. Four years later, The Waverly Gallery was nominated for a Pulitzer, and he followed with Lobby Hero, another Drama Desk contender. In his review of that play, Spectator’s Toby Hill wrote, “…within about five minutes, any sense you have of being a member of the audience…has vanished. You’re totally absorbed in what’s going on. Lonergan is particularly good at showing how good intentions can be undermined by unconscious desires. Few of his characters are capable of resisting their own malignant impulses.”

All along, Lonergan was also screenwriting, sometimes for his own artistic fulfillment, sometimes for hire. In 2000, You Can Count on Me brought him to the wide and sudden attention of the film business. The plot was simple – a young man (Mark Ruffalo) in financial straits moves in with his sister (Laura Linney) in their small hometown – but the characters and story sang. The New York Times wrote, “There was such intense realness about it, the way people really talk, the way lives are actually lived, that was unlike anything else on screen, radical almost, in its attention to the genuine messiness of human lives.” It was eleven more years before he wrote and directed his next film, the beautiful and devastating Margaret. It crushed Lonergan in the process. Release was delayed for years over a ruinous legal battle with the studio over (mainly) the length of film. He agonized over the artistic compromises he was forced to make and disavowed the version released by the studio, which basically dumped it. As a result, most people missed a film The New Yorker said would be “…remembered, years and decades hence, as one of the year’s, even the decade’s, cinematic wonders.”

The blow was lasting, prompting friends like Matt Damon to step in. To cheer him up, Damon commissioned the script for Manchester By the Sea, and five years after Margaret, we’re looking at another masterpiece. Like most of his work, it gives voice to mundane people leading mundane lives, but without condescension – or resolution. Singular events and problems may be settled, but questions of his characters’ destinies go largely unanswered. How can they be? Like ours, they’ll continue to unfold slowly and haphazardly. If you believe life should be tidy, you believe we have the ability to control it. Nice idea, shaky premise.

Amazon snatched up rights to Manchester for $10 million, and with more platforms becoming studios, no doubt Lonergan’s subtle, resounding voice will reach the wider audience it merits. If it’s a bit slow in happening, that’s okay. We’ll wait.

David Oyelowo has a favorite phrase from St. Francis of Assisi. “Preach the gospel, and every now and again use words.” You could see why. One of the most remarkably talented film and stage actors working today, he employs words to stunning effect, but it’s between syllables that one sees his real power. There’s something in his being that telegraphs a certain dignity, a deep human awareness and an underlying joy that he seems incapable of turning off, on screen or in person. “He’s kind of an amazing balance of import and also a kind of levity and light,” said J. J. Abrams, producer of Oyelowo’s upcoming film The God Particle.

He’s best known for his acclaimed portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, in which his embodiment of a man raised to sainthood status as one also troubled by fear and doubt was praised most widely for its authenticity. That lack of hagiography may be partly due to an outsider’s perspective. Race played a significant, but different role in his life. He was born in London to Nigerian parents who moved the family to Lagos when he was six, and back when he was 14. Comparatively privileged in Nigeria where classmates called him coconut (white inside) and in more humble circumstances in the UK, he never completely fit. He took nothing for granted other than his own self-worth, and the importance of bettering himself.

Despite being a hard worker and ambitious, he admits to enrolling in a youth theater program only because a girl he liked invited him. Oyelowo didn’t share his decision to pursue acting with his father (who was thinking along more lawyerly lines) until he’d secured a scholarship to London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He was offered a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in a major landmark for color-blind casting, became the first black actor to play an English king in a major production of Shakespeare. He was soon getting parts in a number of British films and TV series, most famously, officer Danny Hunter in the British TV drama series Spooks (MI-5 to North American audiences).

Problem was, given British producers’ fondness for period pieces, he found the choice of interesting roles for black actors if not insulting, at least limiting. When he looked at the careers of his acting heroes – Will Smith, Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington – he realized they were made in Hollywood. So that’s where he went. Catching the eye of major directors like Ava DuVernay and Lee Daniels opened opportunities for more nuanced characters, and recognition. His work in The Butler, Red Tails, Intersteller, and Disney’s Queen of Katwe garnered a wider audience, but his 83-minute masterwork may just be HBO’s Nightingale. Writing about the 2014 film, which essentially starred Oyelowo and a room, The New York Times called his performance nothing less than amazing. “Mr. Oyelowo gives a riveting, disorienting and suspenseful tour of an unraveling mind. The music and cinematography are artful, but the props are mundane: a coffee maker, a mirror, a laptop. Everything is in Mr. Oyelowo’s voice, face and body.”

He found time for an all-too-brief return to the stage last year in an “electrifying” Othello opposite Daniel Craig, something we’ll be kicking ourselves for a long time for missing. “Mr. Oyelowo is Olympian in his anguish,” read the review in the Times’ Critics’ Picks. “His Othello is the real thing — a bona fide tragic hero, whose capacity for emotion is way beyond our everyday depths.”

Early on in his career, Oyelowo told his agent to put him up only for non-race-specific parts, an edict he worried was naïve when offers were initially slow in coming. But holding steadfast has given him a chance to prove his range. And while he remains adamant about not playing one type of character, he is interested in a recurring character trait. He believes virtue is “something to be celebrated — entertaining, compelling, dramatic.” It’s not something you hear from many actors, and maybe that’s for the best. In the hands of an artist of lesser skill and subtlety, the intent might be noble, but the result one-note or worse, pandering and corny. In Oyelowo’s work, we’re able to look past even the most cynical parts of ourselves, and see something to hope for. In him, we have actor we not only can’t look away from, but simply don’t want to.

In 1990 Elijah Wood sat down with Entertainment Tonight to discuss his career. He seemed a little directionless for a moment, wavering between “doing something with sharks” and acting, but towards the end, convinced himself that acting was the way to go. “Doing scenes is fun. You can be anyone you want. I’ve got a good career doing this.” If that seemed cocky for a nine-year-old, it’s hard to resist a kid who’s cuter and more elfin than a…well, you know. And even brief history proved to be on his side. A talent agent who’d spotted a 7-year-old Wood suggested an acting career, and one week later his folks had sold their Cedar Rapids, Iowa deli and were on the road to L.A. He made his debut in Back to the Future II at nine and had four major films in the can by the time he turned 12. In her review of North for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Wood is currently the most natural, confident child actor of his generation.” Of his work in The War, Roger Ebert stated that Wood had “emerged as the most talented actor, in his age group, in Hollywood history.”

Cue the child actor implosion, right? Hardly. Cue Peter Jackson, and enter The Hobbit. At 18, Wood signed on for what became one of the most life-consuming, awards-sweeping cultural phenomenons in recent cinematic memory. The Lord of The Rings trilogy was filmed and released with mind-boggling speed for films of such scope and detail: The Fellowship of the Ring was released in 2001, The Two Towers in 2002 and The Return of the King in 2003, Wood starring in each as the intrepid Frodo Baggins. He loved the experience, but the danger of leading a monster franchise is, of course, that it can leave an actor with a dilemma in the face of his next career move. Even if you’re looking to replicate the same brand of success, how many non-ridiculous roles for four-foot-tall, pointy-eared, Middle Earth-dwelling types are there?

But a post-success existential crisis was probably never in the cards for Wood, who credits his mom as a steadying influence who stressed family and friends over Hollywood. It also just doesn’t seem to be in his nature. LOTR has allowed Wood to make choices based on personal artistic interests versus box office domination, and that’s when he became even more interesting as an actor. “It’s time we stop only thinking about Elijah Wood for his work with Peter Jackson,” declared Decider last year. “He has become the surprisingly complicated force to be reckoned with.”

His first post-trilogy role was in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He next played the serial killer in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City. More such films followed, each different from its predecessor, each pegging him as one of the most unpeggable actors around. Not surprising, then, that his first starring TV role was a suicidal, wide-eyed straight man to a crude, non-existent dog. Wilfred was a cult-favorite remake of the Australian original – a bummer-from-down-under take on Harvey. He’s part of another unapologetically odd, and equally watchable duo in his current series, BBC America’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. But wait, there’s more (as there always is with curious types whose interests pile up like books on a never-empty nightstand). The long-time music fanatic became a skilled professional DJ and started his own label, Simian Records, signing a number of indie acts.

He’s also been able to indulge his love for the horror genre, acting in gems like Grand Piano, in which he plays a musician terrorized in the course of making a professional comeback. IndieWire wrote, “As the man behind the keys, Wood carries the film, finding a believable and compelling arc for a character whose default setting might in lesser hands be desperation.” Next up is I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore, which debuted at Sundance and is already generating buzz.

He’s aiding and abetting original filmmaking from the other side of the camera as well. He co-founded SpectreVision to help young, promising directors with unique voices make films “that wouldn’t necessarily get made if it weren’t for us maniacs.” If their smart, hilariously gory The Greasy Strangler is any indication, mission accomplished. Wood believes Hollywood greed produces bad movies, and that audiences are slowly losing interest in big-budget action flicks in favor of more intelligent – or at least interesting – fare. As a producer whose first question to potential filmmakers is, “Do you have a personal passion project that no one will support because it’s too outside the box?” he’s obviously a guy we need in the game.

For the uninitiated, or just those curious about things that seem insane: Motocross could be defined simply as a bunch of guys going around and around a track. Watch a race, and you’ll see it’s more like a ballet. Only the dancer is moving at speeds of up to 60 mph across a dirt stage of turns, obstacles and jumps that can shoot him 70 feet forward and send him soaring as high as a three-story building. All while (hopefully) astride a 220-lb bike. Adding to the fun, he’s dancing with a corps of at least 20 other guys trying to do the same thing – only faster – to a soundtrack that vibrates like a chorus of very angry bears. Okay, never mind; that doesn’t sound much like dance after all. Nor does it sound any less insane, which why it requires just the opposite: complete cool, control and focus.

And dedication. Ricky Carmichael got his first minibike as a Valentine’s Day gift. He was five. His scored his first win at six in Daytona, Fla., and by 13, he was arguably the fastest minibike rider in world. But if bigger bikes exist, they must be ridden, and Carmichael rode – first 125ccs, then 250s and eventually 450s – with tunnel vision on the scoreboard. He won several main events in his rookie year with the Splitfire Pro Circuit Kawasaki team at age 18, and came back to finish the job by winning all eight main events of the Supercross 1998 125cc East Region. [Supercross is motocross, but takes place in stadiums.] In 2000, he jumped to the 250 class and won the 250 National Motocross Championship on his first try. The next year, he won 13 out of 15 Supercross races as well as the championship. In 2002, Carmichael accomplished something previously thought impossible: He won all 24 motos of the 2002 National season. In 2003, he won both Supercross and National titles again. And in 2004 he again won all 24 National motos, proving his 2002 feat was not a supernatural once-in-a-lifetime event. In 2005, he also won all 12 events in the 250cc Outdoor National Championship, winning 22 of 24 motos on a 450. Carmichael also scored the U.S. Open of Supercross title and led Team USA to victory at the Motocross des Nations. Along the way, he battled back from several injuries sustained in crashes as spectacular as his wins. (Search “Ricky Carmichael worst crashes” and prepare to cringe.)

He announced that 2006 would be his last full-time season and then got down to business, dominating the Outdoor National Championship season. In 2007 he raced only select events but still finished with three Supercross wins and six Outdoor National Championship wins, taking every race he entered, remaining arguably the fastest rider on the track, and inarguably, with his record 150 combined SX/MX career victories, the winningest racer in the sport – The Greatest Of All Time.

In his 2007 semi-retirement, he took up another long-held ambition: the sedate pursuit of NASCAR racing, which still involves going around and around a track, this time at about 200 mph. In 2015, he was inducted in the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America.

Roger DeCoster, the Suzuki team manager responsible for recruiting Carmichael in 2005, said, “He is the most dedicated guy I have ever worked with. He wants to win as much on Mondays as he does on race day. He raises the game of the people around him. He gives his all.” Sounds about right for a guy who told Transworld Motocross at the start of his career, “I won’t accept seconds and thirds.” Coming up, he also paid attention to the off-track commonalities he noted among his racing idols: good sportsmanship and humility. The hype that surrounded Carmichael throughout his career went largely in one ear and out the other, and to this day he’s consistently gracious in discussing his fiercest rivals. Dirt Rider called him “the best bargain in motocross,” opining that top MX sponsors couldn’t pay enough for the PR value he brought to their brands.

These days, he co-owns professional Supercross/Motocross team RCH Racing. Carmichael leads the team’s rider development, testing, and research programs. He’s also helping advance the next generation of riders by hosting a hands-on riding school with instructors who collectively boast over 20 AMA national titles. He lends his name to the Ricky Carmichael Daytona Amateur Supercross, one of five annual major amateur championship events across the country. And, he’s taking what he’s learned on the bigger, better-funded NASCAR circuit to help grow audience and sponsorship for MX/SX, which counts 80 percent of its fans among the coveted 18-35 age bracket. Seems Carmichael’s just destined to keep going around in circles, moving the sport forward the whole time.

When you’re born a month premature in your parents’ small-town Idaho bathroom, there’s no place to go but up, right? So instead of college, why not take your ’82 Corolla, $6,000, and your mom, and head out to L.A. to be an actor? Under those circumstances, a kooky contestant spot on The Price is Right and a string of commercials (Corn Pops, Juicy Fruit, Vanilla Coke) are legitimately “up.”

The wacked-out, frenetic gusto with which the young Aaron Paul pitched those products could be presumed the result of consuming admirable quantities of them. Get to know him, though, and you realize the intensity is that of a guy who’s all-in, all the time. A guy who embraces each new opportunity with the zeal that comes from not knowing if “now” will ever happen again. When you spend seven years doing one-episode guest TV appearances before landing on – and surviving – one of the most critically acclaimed TV shows of all time, you can’t be blamed for thinking that way.

As Breaking Bad’s chemistry student/meth addict/drug dealer Jesse Pinkman, Paul was supposed to be killed off after the show’s first season. Instead, he became the only character besides lead Bryan Cranston to appear in every episode of the show, which went on to win 16 Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards (among many, many others). It won Paul himself the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series three times. While Breaking Bad may have killed its own with reckless abandon, creator Vince Gilligan showed shrewd discrimination in keeping Paul above ground, telling Details magazine, “Over the years, Jesse became more likable than I originally intended, because Aaron himself is so easy to relate to. He deepened my understanding of the character, and that deepened the meaning of the show.” If viewers related to Jesse, it was because Paul lent him poignancy and a moral compass, even if its needle was inclined to wobble.

Paul’s bantam cockiness as Tobey Marshall in 2014’s Need for Speed exemplifies his gift for letting us sense versus see what goes on beneath his characters’ cultivated personae. There’s no doubting his talent, but that’s an amorphous word. Paul’s best work draws on instinct, and a deep curiosity about people, morality and human contradictions; characters and their stories are one way for him to explore the answers. The fact that he’s the son of a Baptist minister made us especially curious about his experience starring in Hulu’s original series The Path, where he portrays a cult member struggling with questions of faith, power and marriage.

It’s a good career moment for an inveterate seeker like Paul, who loves what he’s doing but loves whatever he may do next even more. Last year alone, he got back in the blood-and-guts biz in the highbrow heist flick Triple 9 with Kate Winslet and Chiwetel Ejiofor and turned in strong, sympathetic performances in both Eye In The Sky and Come and Find Me. He’s been starring in and executive-producing Netflix’s dark comedy BoJack Horseman, and recently sold a one-hour drama to NBC.

And why not? If Paul still sees Breaking Bad as a unicorn, then no better time to be all-in. In a New York Times article, Bryan Cranston recalled an especially punishing location shoot that left the Breaking cast exhausted. “We’re wiping our brows and [Aaron] just said to me, ‘Aw, man, that was so much fun.’ I said, ‘Aaron, that’s my wish for you. I hope you never lose that enthusiasm.’ ” We’re not worried.

Crazy? Depressed? Obsessed? Then hey gang – let’s put on a show! A show about an unhappy lawyer who upends a cushy Manhattan life in a delusional move to West Covina (where?) to revive a decade-old romance! Oh yeah, and let’s make it a splashy musical! What’s not to love, right? Since being pitched to (and rejected by) most networks, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has been hailed for its ambitious production, oddly charmingly characters and insightful, if uncomfortable look at modern life and love, all set to giddy song and dance numbers. The New York Times called its Golden Globe-winning star, co-creator and writer Rachel Bloom “the kind of unspoiled voice the industry should be cultivating.” The Times did its part, naming Crazy Ex-Girlfriend among best TV shows of 2016.

Crack open the That Explains A Lot file, and you’ll learn Bloom was exposed to musical theater from a young age by a piano-playing mom and a grandfather who was an amateur director and standup comic. “The first song I learned was “All I Do Is Dream of You” from Singin’ in the Rain, and soon after that I started to get up and sing at family functions.” Until she was 18, her musical diet consisted solely of show tunes.

The passion that led her to perform “Adelaide’s Lament” from Guys and Dolls in a seventh-grade lip-syncing contest, along with a penchant for sweat pants and self-administered haircuts did not grease the path to popularity. In fact, she recalls ages 11-13 as being some of the most miserable of her life. Ah, the joys of being a theater geek. But that experience sparked something that down the road led her to turn the genre she loved on its ear. Bloom noticed the pop culture embraced by her peers glorified teen-hood as something glamorous and mysterious, versus the awkward, messy horror show it so often is. She gamely pursued singing and dancing lessons and at first, a musical theater degree at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Once there, she discovered sketch comedy, joining the school’s Hammerkatz troupe. Sketch writing was a revelation, teaching her discipline and certain rules of comedy. She performed with Upright Citizens Brigade to hone her skills, along with her point of view.

“I fucking hate the word ‘cute’ when it comes to comedy, especially in musical theater, because ‘cute’ usually means predictable and not laugh-out-loud funny or soft,” she told the Dallas Observer in 2014. She believes if you’re not being honest and vulgar (two qualities she thinks can’t be separated), then there’s no point. For Bloom, the magic isn’t in the genre’s glamorous illusions, but in ripping them off like a waxing strip (just Google “The Sexy Getting Ready Song”). But Bloom was “going there” in her own music comedy videos long before going there on the show, using pop culture to skewer itself. She began posting numbers like “You Can Touch My Boobies,” “I Steal Pets,” and “If Disney Cartoons Were Historically Accurate” online. But it was her Britney-esque “F*** Me, Ray Bradbury,” a raunchily heartfelt tribute to her favorite science fiction writer, that changed everything. It garnered three million YouTube views, and got her a job writing for FOX’s Allen Gregory and eventually, brought her to the notice of The Devil Wears Prada screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, who approached her about co-creating Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

The show was created for Showtime, but sold to The CW, which required commendably few cleanups for network TV. But Bloom believes being offensive for the sake of being offensive is lazy and narrow minded. The show largely uses its more outrageous bits to unmask feelings people really have, and deftly employs pop tropes and glitzy music sequences to reflect the heightened emotions we assign to those feelings in our own heads. In the process, it’s also managed to cultivate one of TV’s most diverse and talented casts and bring new generations to a genre they might otherwise reject.

Is Bloom a Sally Bowles for Gen Y? Who knows? But Crazy-Ex has no doubt given her momentum, and it’s exciting to ponder where her smart, fearless, nut-job sensibility might take her. So kids, don’t fly your freak flag at half-mast or hide your jazz hands behind your back. They may get you laughed at for a while, but as Bloom herself found, “I remained myself and the world got cooler around me.”