The Best Performances of 2025

Emma Stone, “Bugonia”

Stone was on my list in 2023, the year she gave two discomfiting comic performances, in the Showtime series “The Curse” and in the Yorgos Lanthimos film “Poor Things.” After winning her second Best Actress Oscar, for the latter, she teamed up with Lanthimos again in this dark-comic adaptation of the South Korean flick “Save the Green Planet!” Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceuticals C.E.O. abducted by a conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons) who thinks she’s an alien in disguise. Is she? Stone is utterly convincing as a steely girlboss, but her performance is laced with enough strangeness to keep us guessing. Fuller couldn’t be further from the guileless, pleasure-seeking woman-child Stone played in “Poor Things,” but she’s proven that she has the range to match her daring, uningratiating choices. As a producer, of “Bugonia” and other projects, she’s just as canny.

Honorable mention: In the long-awaited second season of “Severance,” another eerie, sci-fi-inflected take on corporate malevolence, Britt Lower returned as the defiant “innie” Helly R., but we also got to know her “outie,” Helena Eagan—like Fuller, a C-suite ice queen with a knack for manipulation.

Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper, “Adolescence”

Playing father and son, Graham and Cooper anchored this bracing Netflix miniseries, about a sweet-looking thirteen-year-old in Yorkshire who is arrested for the murder of a female classmate. Cooper, who was fourteen and unknown when he filmed the show, revealed his character’s manosphere-addled psyche by terrifying degrees. Graham, who created the series with Jack Thorne, was equally riveting as the salt-of-the-earth dad who goes from defiantly protective to haunted by the violence he missed brewing within his own son. Because each of the four episodes was filmed in one continuous shot, Graham’s and Cooper’s performances required an unusual level of technical and emotional prowess. Both won Emmys, as did Erin Doherty, as a forensic psychologist out of her depth.

Honorable mention: Doherty’s win was well-deserved, but I was rooting for Jenny Slate, who shone in another limited series, FX’s “Dying for Sex,” as a woman whose best friend (Michelle Williams) has terminal cancer. Slate drew on her standup-comedy kookiness to create a grounded portrait of platonic love and the strain of caretaking.

Sarah Snook, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

Hot off “Succession,” Snook stormed Broadway in Kip Williams’s one-woman adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel. “One-woman” might be a misnomer, actually; while Snook did play twenty-six characters—all expertly delineated by accent, costume, and demeanor—she was joined by a hive of crew members doing complicated camera work. Sometimes Snook was onstage in the flesh and projected on screens at once, playing opposite herself, like a Victorian hall of mirrors. This allowed her to show off her skills as a stage performer, alongside the sly closeup work we know from her years as Shiv Roy—all while spitting out Wilde’s prose with motormouthed alacrity. Having won an Olivier for her performance on the West End, Snook handily took home a Tony Award.

Honorable mention: Elsewhere on Broadway, Jonathan Groff is playing Bobby Darin in the bio-musical “Just in Time,” only a year after his Tony-winning performance in “Merrily We Roll Along.” The musical is also not a solo show, but it rests on Groff’s capable shoulders. Singing “Mack the Knife” and “Splish Splash,” he’s absolutely croon-worthy.