The one actor most likely to appear in a great movie, according to science
Fame is something all actors strive for, but consistency is even more impressive.
What defines ‘great acting’ is entirely subjective, but it is fascinating to analyse different metrics for success, for while there are many all-time great actors who have turned in foundational performances, changing the industry forever, ultimately their filmographies are mixed because of what they were involved with later on in their careers.
Robert De Niro, for example, will always be best remembered for The Godfather: Part II, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and The Deer Hunter, but his fans tend to forget about Righteous Kill, Dirty Grandpa, Little Fockers, and Last Vegas. A statistical analysis of the actor most consistent in choosing great projects takes into account films that consistently score well on IMDb audience scores and critics’ averages on Metacritic.
It’s an imperfect system, given that IMDb scores can be manipulated by block voting, trolling, and bots, and Metacritic scores tend to draw from a rather limited pool of privileged American critics, many of whom live in coastal cities like New York and Los Angeles. This is also justified by putting a quantitative assessment on a quality that is entirely objective, given that all art is in the eye of the beholder.
With those caveats in mind, the actor whose output has been most consistently well-received in recent years is Carey Mulligan, who narrowly beat out competitors like Tom Hardy, Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, and Tom Hanks, and while this doesn’t account for how well-received her performances were in said projects, it’s unlikely that anything she’s been in would be poorly received.
Mulligan had a pretty great start to her career, given that she made her acting debut in Pride & Prejudice, the acclaimed adaptation of the Jane Austen novel from director Joe Wright, and only four years she would pick up her first Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’ for her soulful performance in An Education, while earning other nominations in the same category for Promising Young Woman and Maestro.
Mulligan’s consistency may come from the fact that she is flexible in working on different types of projects. She took on a raunchier role in Shame, played opposite Ryan Gosling in Drive, portrayed a real journalist in She Said, captured an iconic literary character in The Great Gatsby, and showed her musical skills in The Ballad of Wallis Island. The actor has even been willing to take on relatively smaller roles in films that are from brilliant filmmakers, such as Inside Llewyn Davis, Mudbound, Wildlife, Public Enemies, and Brothers.
It’s hard to find any true ‘misses’ in Mulligan’s filmography, as she has yet to appear in a film that has been completely detested, and while the Netflix science fiction drama Spaceman drew more muted praise, even its critics seemed to agree that it was too ambitious to be deemed a complete failure. As is often the case with an actor who has had such an impressive resume, Mulligan’s name has been brought up during discussions about those in the industry who are most overdue for an Academy Award victory.
Her next live-action role is in Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, which is unlikely to be an awards contender because it is being released in February, but it’s entirely possible that Mulligan could win an Emmy for her role in the second season of the Netflix limited series Beef, which reunited her with her Inside Llewyn Davis co-star Oscar Isaac.
