Across the past decade, we’ve come to associate Christopher Nolan with the kind of grand spectacle that we hardly ever see anymore. From “Batman Begins” through to this week’s “Interstellar” (read our review here, and a different take in our retrospective here) Nolan makes grand movies about big ideas, and sometimes (mostly unfairly, we’d argue) comes in for criticism that he’s not that interested in people.
But as shown by everything from his more intimate, character-driven early work to the top-notch ensemble of “Interstellar” (which features Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, Michael Caine, John Lithgow, Mackenzie Foy, and many more), Nolan’s actually a far better director of actors than you’d imagine for someone making $200 million epics. Indeed, almost every one of his films has a performance to cherish, and several have multiple memorable turns.
So, with “Interstellar” hitting theaters this week, we thought we’d celebrate by picking out ten of our favorite performances in Nolan movies. Take a look at our selections below, and let us know your own favorites in the comments.
Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby in “Memento” (2000)
If we acknowledge that, for all its promise, the acting in Nolan’s debut “Following” is a bit dodgy (not a huge shock, given that it was mostly using non-professional friends), then the first truly impressive performance in the director’s canon came in his breakthrough picture, 2000’s “Memento.” All the principles are excellent — Joe Pantoliano‘s weasely manipulator Teddy,Carrie-Anne Moss‘ wounded provocateur femme fatale Natalie, even the briefly heartbreaking Stephen Tobolosky as Sammy Jankis — but it’s Guy Pearce‘s film all over, giving the actor perhaps the most iconic and defining performance of his career. It nearly didn’t happen: Brad Pitt flirted with the film but passed in favor of “Snatch,” and Thomas Jane and future “Dark Knight” star Aaron Eckhart were also considered. But Pearce, a character actor in the body of a leading man who has an unusual, and very fitting, ability to feel like a blank slate, is so good here that it’s possible that the film wouldn’t work as well without him. The part of Leonard Shelby, who can’t retain new memories for more than a few minutes at a time and is out to avenge the murder of his wife, is a tricky one: in theory, he should be starting every section with a new kind of grief and confusion. But Pearce’s deliberately stilted, faltering performance pulls it off, while also suggesting a ferocious drive that keeps him going even through his occasional reboots. It’s a turn of both absolute certainty and total uncertainty, but Pearce unites the two with strength, and with vulnerability, and even with some dry humor. It’s a shame that, so far, the actor hasn’t reteamed with Nolan (they discussed Pearce playing Liam Neeson‘s role in “Batman Begins” before agreeing that he was too young for the part). 
Robin Williams as Walter Finch in “Insomnia” (2002)
One of Nolan’s more unsung strengths is his facility for casting: his risky but rewarding choices for major roles (remember the outcry over Heath Ledger orAnne Hathaway in the Batman films?), his canny deployment of character actor aces like Mark Boone Junior or Nicky Katt, or his unexpected but ever-effective use of faded ’80s icons like Eric Roberts, Tom Berenger andMatthew Modine. But maybe his greatest casting coup came with his first studio picture, “Insomnia,” in which comedy superstar Robin Williams played the villain. Nolan certainly wasn’t the first to think of Williams in a serious role, and he wasn’t even the first to put him in a dark role — “One Hour Photo” and “Death To Smoochy” had shot immediately before, and both premiered ahead of “Insomnia.” But the film, in which Wililams plays crime writer and murderer Walter Finch, sees the actor master the dark arts. His comedic tics and eagerness to please fall away in a restrained performance that embodies the banality of evil. And not even the banality, either: Williams captures the queasy self-justification of killers like Finch, the true belief that they’re fundamentally misunderstood by the world, that they killed because they loved too much, and it’s a powerful, truly loathsome, truly remarkable performance, and one that reminds us once again how much we’ll miss the star.
