Five Actresses Who Make Me Rethink What Range Actually Means

How I Actually Chose These Five Names

I have spent twenty-two years working in New York theaters and on sets from the East Village to Manhattan's midtown stages. That means my criteria are not box office numbers or award counts, though those matter in their own way. My criterion is this: can I watch a single unbroken take of their work and identify at least three distinct technical choices that a student could isolate and practice? If the answer is yes, they make the list. If the performance is just beautiful and I cannot articulate why, it does not qualify for this particular conversation.

I also weighted for range across mediums. An actress who is extraordinary in film but has never committed to the live vulnerability of a theater audience gets a different kind of credit than one who can hold a room of eight hundred people without a single cut. I wanted women who prove themselves in both arenas, or at least in one arena with such ferocity that the other becomes irrelevant.

And a small personal note: as a Venezuelan-American woman who has played everything from a Cuban grandmother in a Broadway revival to a forensic accountant in an indie film, I look for actresses who make me feel less alone in the specific body I carry. These five do that. They are not interchangeable icons. They are five different women solving the same fundamental problem of making a human being visible on a surface, and they solve it in ways that still surprise me after two decades of watching.

Viola Davis and the Architecture of One Breath

I saw Fences live at the Walter Kerr in 2010, and I will be honest with you: I cried in row C because she made a woman washing a dish feel like a tectonic plate shifting. The specific thing that undid me was not her dialogue. It was the half-second she held before setting the sponge down after Monrose asks about August Wilson. That beat, that tiny muscular decision to let the audience sit in the discomfort of the question before she answers, is the most advanced acting technique I have ever witnessed. She trusts silence more than most directors trust their own scripts.

What makes Viola a study rather than just a star is her physical economy. Watch her in The Help or A Quiet Place and you will notice she never uses more gesture than the scene requires. Her hands are almost still. Her weight shifts are minimal. And yet every single micro-movement carries the full emotional payload of the line. In a city full of actors who perform with their shoulders and their jaw, watching Viola play a scene where her only visible movement is the slight tightening around her lower lip is like watching a pianist play a single note and make you feel an entire symphony.

For my students, I assign her monologue as Rose in Fences, specifically the section where she talks about the garden. I do not ask them to imitate her voice or her cadence. I ask them to find the one physical anchor in their own body that they will commit to for the duration of the speech and then let everything else fall away from that single point. That is what she does. That is the technique underneath the genius.

Blanchett and McDormand: Two Kinds of Stillness

Cate Blanchett in Tár is a masterclass in what I call controlled collapse. She plays a woman who is, for ninety minutes, absolutely certain of her own authority, and then the film asks her to watch that certainty crack without ever letting her lose composure. The specific scene where she corrects a student's breathing while her own hands tremble almost imperceptibly at her sides is the most technically precise performance I have seen in a decade of New York theater and beyond. She does not act the trembling. She lets it happen to her fingers while her face remains a mask of pedagogical calm. The audience has to catch it. That is advanced acting.

Frances McDormand, by contrast, gives me the opposite lesson: stillness as weapon rather than restraint. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, her character does not hold back. She rages, she bargains, she laughs at herself in a diner. But the through-line is that every emotional outburst lands on a fixed point of absolute clarity about what she wants. McDormand's stillness is not the absence of movement. It is the presence of intention so strong that the movement becomes almost incidental. In Three Women, her quiet kitchen scenes carry the same gravitational pull as her loudest confrontations, and that consistency across register is what separates her from actresses who are brilliant in one mode and merely competent in another.

I put them together because they represent two ends of the same spectrum that every working actress must navigate. Blanchett teaches you to find the power in what you do not show. McDormand teaches you to find the power in what you do show, delivered with such specificity that it never becomes performance. In my workshops, I have actors watch a Blanchett scene and then a McDormand scene back to back and ask them: where is your natural gravity? Are you a controlled-collapse person or a fixed-point person? The answer changes everything about how you build a character.

Colman and Thompson: The Body as Primary Text

Olivia Colman in The Favourite is the reason I tell my students that comedy is harder than tragedy. Her physicality in that film is not acting. It is a full-body compositional system where every gesture, every shift of weight, every way she holds her tea cup is carrying character information that dialogue cannot reach. The scene where she dances with Rachel Weisz is not funny because of the lines. It is funny because Colman's entire skeletal structure is negotiating two different gravitational fields simultaneously, and the audience feels the effort before they understand it intellectually. That is a level of physical acting training that most conservatories in this country do not adequately teach.

Tessa Thompson brings something I can only call narrative stamina to the table. In Nocturnal Animals, she plays a woman in two temporal realities, and the specific way she adjusts her posture between those two versions of herself is so precise that you can see the architecture of the character under the skin. In Little Fires Everywhere, she holds a scene where her grief is not performed but inhabited, and the camera lingers on her hands sorting laundry while she says nothing, and that silence does more narrative work than three pages of dialogue could. Thompson's gift is making the audience believe that the character was already there before the scene started and will keep existing after it ends.

Both women teach me something I have to remind myself in every rehearsal: your body is not a vehicle for your voice. Your body is the text. The words are just annotations. When Colman moves through a room, you understand her character's relationship to power before she speaks a single word. When Thompson stands still, you understand her character's history of loss without a single flashback. In a profession where so many young actors are trained to think in lines and beats, these two women remind me that the audience is watching your spine, your shoulders, the way your feet find the floor.

What You Can Steal From All Five of Them

Here is what I tell my students when they ask me to name one thing to practice this week. Watch Viola Davis wash a dish and identify the single physical anchor she holds. Watch Blanchett correct a student and notice where her hands go when her face refuses to betray emotion. Watch McDormand in a diner and find the fixed point that makes her rage feel inevitable rather than performed. Watch Colman dance and map every joint that is doing work. Watch Thompson fold laundry and trust that silence is a complete sentence. Then go into your rehearsal space, pick one of those five specific techniques, and practice it for twenty minutes before you touch a single line of dialogue.

The common thread across all five women is not talent, though they have that in abundance. The common thread is intentionality at the level of individual physical choices. None of them perform a scene. They solve a problem in real time with their bodies and their breath, and the words happen to come out of that process rather than the other way around. That is the difference between an actress who is good and an actress who is, in the language I use with my own actors, inevitable. You watch them and you feel that the scene could not have been played any other way by any other body in that specific light at that specific moment.

And one last thing, said with the full weight of someone who has stood in a green room feeling small next to her own reflection: these five women are not above us. They are ahead of us on the same road I am still walking. I have seen Viola in a rehearsal studio stretching and fidgeting. I have seen Cate take notes in a production meeting with the same earnest uncertainty any of us feels when someone challenges our interpretation. The gap between me and them is not talent. It is repetition, specificity, and the willingness to be physically vulnerable in front of strangers for two hours without a safety net. That is available to you. That is the whole secret, and it is not romantic, and it is not easy, and it is the most liberating thing I know.