The 10 Best Performances In The Films Of Christopher Nolan

Rebecca Hall as Sarah Borden in “The Prestige” (2006)
Let’s be honest for a moment: with a handful of exceptions, Nolan’s women don’t always get a fair shake. Some are better rounded than others, but quite often they’re exposition machines (Hilary Swank in “Insomnia,” Ellen Page in “Inception“), or characters without much agency who exist mostly to motivate a hero (Katie Holmes and Maggie Gyllenhaal in the Bat-flicks). Rebecca Hall‘s role in “The Prestige” arguably fits into the latter category, to some degree, but it’s still a strikingly raw and wrenching turn that’s one of the most purely emotional performances in the director’s work, at least pre-“Interstellar.” Hall, then aged only 24 and with only one other screen performance under her belt (underrated rom-com “Starter For 10” had premiered at TIFF the month before), doesn’t crop up until some way into the movie, playing a nanny/governess who falls in love with Bale’s Borden. The two swiftly marry and have kids, but he can seem schizophrenic: deeply in love with her one day, indifferent and distant the next. Initially, she can put up with it (the answer, as it turns out, is tied to Borden’s big secret), but when he fairly blatantly starts having an affair with assistant Scarlett Johansson, it becomes too much to bear. Hall’s emotional collapse, leading to her suicide, is the most powerful, shocking in a film full of powerful and shocking things, and hits home in a way that some of the women failed by Nolan’s other male heroes don’t necessarily. No wonder that Hall, almost immediately, was marked for big things. Heath Ledger as The Joker in “The Dark Knight” (2008)
Like we said earlier, even with goodwill bought by the critical and commercial success of “Batman Begins,” people were surprised, even angry, about the choice of pretty-boy actor Heath Ledger, best known for his Oscar-nominated turn in “Brokeback Mountain,” as the Joker in sequel “The Dark Knight.” After all, Jack Nicholson‘s turn in 1989’s “Batman” was still one of superhero cinema’s most iconic villains, and Ledger was hardly known for this kind of thing. But it was the sneak attack that’s the key to his titanic performance: every tic, gesture, line-reading is unpredictable, making the character into a destructive force of nature that feels genuinely dangerous. The actor understands that the Joker shouldn’t be funny to anyone but himself, and his skewed sense of humor is one of the most distinctive variations on the performance: despite attempts by the media to bring Ledger’s commitment to the part into the narrative of his death (which happened after the film wrapped, six months before release), he told an interviewer while on the “I’m Not There” press tour that it was “the most fun I’ve had playing a character, hands down.” And it shows. Even if Ledger had lived to see it, his Joker was always going to stand in the top tier of screen villains, and define the character for generations to come. Tom Hardy as Eames in “Inception” (2010)
As much as we love “Inception,” some of the characters can come across as cyphers to some degree — look at poor old Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who has almost nothing to play, or Ellen Page, a slave to all the information she has to get across. But the exception is Tom Hardy, who plays the “forger” onLeonardo DiCaprio‘s team of dream-hopping con-men. Hardy had come to Hollywood’s attentions two years earlier with Nicolas Winding Refn‘s “Bronson,” but cemented his rising stardom here with a turn that’s rather unlike what we think of as Nolan characters: sly, funny and even kind of sexy. There’s little sense of Eames on the page, but Hardy’s off-kilter rhythms make him cunningly into a sort of archaic British public-school rogue out of anEvelyn Waugh novel: you get the sense he was kicked out of Cambridge, has wandered the world racking up gambling debts and lovers, and somehow fell into Cobb’s orbit. Hardy suggests so much with so little, whether his slightly faltering delivery of his plan regarding Cillian Murphy and his relationship with his father seemingly calling to mind his own family issues, or his rivalry/flirtation with Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur — nothing’s ever said, exactly, but you definitely get the sense that they’re jumping bones off-screen, or at least that they want to. It’s a colorful and fun performance in a way that we don’t see enough of in Nolan’s films, and we could use more like it in the director’s canon.