This past fall, I met one of the world’s most esteemed actors, the French star Isabelle Huppert, who declared that making movies is “very easy for me. I’m very lazy. I know a lot of people speak about the effort or the difficulties. For me, it’s never difficult. I do it without even thinking about it.” Then she clarified, “Theatre is difficult.” No one really knows what acting is, not even actors. Is it craft? Is it intuition? Should it take an incredible amount of hard work or none at all? However they do what they do, great performers become part of us—they are us, in a way, because they allow us to live, momentarily, outside our own skin.

2019 in Review New Yorker writers reflect

on the year’s best.

Below is a list of ten performances that thrilled and delighted me this year, whether in movies, on television, or onstage. The usual caveats apply: this is completely subjective and nowhere near comprehensive, since, despite feeding my eyes and ears with entertainment all year round, I haven’t seen everything. (Also, “Cats” has yet to be revealed.) Amid an avalanche of amusements, these performances broke through. They were real, unexpected, and alive.

Photograph Courtesy Netflix

Natasha Lyonne in “Russian Doll”

Lyonne is like an old punk den on a gentrified block of Avenue B: ornery, cigarette-stained, and utterly one of a kind. Her ingenious Netflix show, which she created with Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler, has a Rubik’s Cube-like cosmology unto itself, but the whole thing seems to emanate from Lyonne’s blunt force of personality. As Nadia Vulvokov, who finds herself reliving the same night in the East Village, each time dying in some elaborate new way, Lyonne lets her street-honed idiosyncrasies run wild—who can forget her pronunciation of “cock-a-roach”—while revealing the character’s psychic wounds. Lyonne is a true New Yawker. Let’s hope she never gets replaced by a CVS.

Joe Pesci in “The Irishman”

Somehow, after three and a half hours watching De Niro, Pacino, and Scorsese flaunt their collective gifts, the name on my lips, as I emerged from “The Irishman,” was Pesci. At seventy-six, the Oscar-winning actor came out of semi-retirement to do something surprising with a role: he underplayed it. Quietly sinister isn’t a mode of Pesci’s that we’re used to. His star-making turns in the Scorsese films “Raging Bull” and “GoodFellas” created a mold for the helium-voiced wise guy, who squawks “I amuse you?” before he flies off the handle. The type was crystallized in comedies such as “My Cousin Vinny” and “Home Alone.” But, as Russell Bufalino, who acts as a kind of mobbed-up Mephistopheles to De Niro’s Frank Sheeran, Pesci is subtler and scarier than we’ve ever seen him. Peering through tinted glasses, he plays his cards close to his chest—and even De Niro knows who is boss.

Michelle Williams in “Fosse/Verdon”

The FX miniseries seeks to carve out more space in the Bob Fosse legend for his partner in life and in show biz, the Broadway luminary Gwen Verdon. To my mind, the writing sometimes winds up cheating Verdon’s contributions by insisting on them too pettily—who cares if she personally flew a gorilla costume to the set of “Cabaret”? She was a star, not an unsung helpmeet. In any case, Williams stuns in the role because she weds Verdon’s razzle-dazzle exterior and neglected interior. That bright lipstick, that hoofer drawl—Williams embodies Verdon’s exact species of old-school broad, smiling harder into the footlights with each crushing disappointment. For an actress who so often projects fragility, it was startling to see Williams play a brassy creature of the stage.

Song Kang-ho in “Parasite”

The film by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho navigates such hairpin turns of plot and tone that you’re barely able to register its performances, and yet they have to wind the same harrowing path. As Ki-taek, the patriarch of a penniless South Korean family that insinuates itself into the lives of a well-to-do household, Song, who previously starred in the director’s “Memories of Murder,” “The Host,” and “Snowpiercer,” manages to ground the genre-resistant tale of class warfare in a coherent psychology. His Ki-taek is by turns gregarious, stoic, funny, and homicidal, but somehow he makes each wild twist seem not just plausible but inexorable. Without a trace of melodrama, Song roots the story in the need for survival, and then shows us how far we’re willing to follow at his side.

David Byrne in “American Utopia”

At sixty-seven, the former Talking Heads front man is still letting his roving mind guide him to uncharted places. His Broadway show, which is playing through February, is part concert, part vision quest, and part WTF. Accompanied by a twelve-piece band—barefoot and silver-suited, like he is—Byrne begins the show by contemplating a model of a human brain, and then fills the stage with dance, noise, and musings. It’s entirely joyous, even when it’s angry—and it is angry, for all the right reasons, when the group performs a cover of Janelle Monáe’s police-brutality anthem, “Hell You Talmbout.” Mostly, Byrne wants to invite us in to his happy, peculiar world, whether it’s with “Burning Down the House” or something entirely new.

Photograph by Sophie Mutevelian / HBO

Helena Bonham Carter in “The Crown”

As a middle-aged Princess Margaret, Bonham Carter takes the reins from the formidable Vanessa Kirby, who plays the Queen’s tempestuous younger sister in the show’s first two seasons. In her new incarnation, Margaret’s glamour and restlessness has become more curdled and more fun. What could bring more pleasure than watching her trade dirty limericks with Lyndon Johnson, or commiserate with the former Vice-President by naughtily calling herself the “Vice-Queen”? Bonham Carter, like the royal misfit she plays, brings the elegant proceedings some much needed sex and mischief, while also revealing Margaret’s crushing desperation—all ideally matched to the steadiness and repression of Olivia Colman’s Elizabeth. Freed of being Tim Burton’s icy goth muse, Bonham Carter reminds us that she’s at her best when playing warm-blooded humans.

Adrienne Warren in “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”

Playing an icon in a biographical jukebox musical is a nearly impossible task. You have to channel a powerhouse performer (and hit all the same notes) while simultaneously avoiding mere mimicry and transcending the inherent triteness of the genre. On Broadway, Warren has all the right assets to play Turner: arms of iron, nerves of steel, and a voice that turns into a roar in its upper register. Her rendition of “River Deep-Mountain High,” set in Phil Spector’s recording studio, is a stunner. In the show’s final minutes, the plot falls away, and she gives us what amounts to a mini-concert, handily bringing down the house with “Proud Mary.” Warren sings as if her life depended on it, which, for Turner, it did.

The Cast of “Succession”

How do you single out just one? Would it be Matthew Macfadyen’s Tom, the human equivalent of a clumsy parallel-parking job? Or Jeremy Strong as Kendall, who burrows into self-annihilation and comes out the other side a corporate killer (with some gloriously bad rapping along the way)? Or Sarah Snook’s Shiv, the sharpest of the Roy heirs, who still manages to bungle her own ascension? Kieran Culkin’s Roman, the resident clown prince? What about J. Smith-Cameron as the stealthy fan favorite Gerri? I could name two or three more virtuosic performances and still not get to Brian Cox, who ends the second season with an astonishingly ambiguous closeup—half pain, half pride. “Succession” is a genuine ensemble piece, with each episode balancing its crackerjack cast, who in turn manage to balance the show’s tricky satirical tone. Plus, can you believe they hail from the likes of Scotland, Norfolk, New York, Boston, Cleveland, Iran, and Australia?

Phoebe Waller-Bridge in “Fleabag”

In early March, sometime before Waller-Bridge decisively took over the world—though she was well on her way—I saw her perform her signature character live, during a five-week run at the hundred-and-seventy-eight-seat SoHo Playhouse. Sitting alone on an empty stage, Waller-Bridge had little more than her mutable face and voice to play multiple roles, chief among them being her messy, self-sabotaging, yet hyperaware heroine, the sexually adventurous owner of a guinea-pig-themed café. Waller-Bridge first performed “Fleabag” live in 2013, at the Edinburgh Festival, before adapting it as a BBC series. This spring, Amazon delivered the second season, and with it the new object of Fleabag’s desire, the hot priest. On camera, Waller-Bridge is never more enticing than when she’s breaking the fourth wall, shooting us half-second looks of startling intimacy and specificity. We’re her confidants, her co-conspirators, and her captive audience. Kneel!

Photograph by Jennifer Clasen / HBO

Laura Dern in “Big Little Lies” and “Marriage Story”

We have hit Peak Dern. In the second season of HBO’s star-studded series and in Noah Baumbach’s divorce drama, now on Netflix, Dern delivered two masterful comic portraits of high-powered California women. On “Big Little Lies,” Renata Klein, the corporate queen of Monterey, has a full-on meltdown as her wealth and her marriage crumble underfoot, leading to such indelible moments as Renata warning her no-good husband, “I will not not be rich.” It was almost too much, but who could complain? In “Marriage Story,” she plays one of a trio of divorce lawyers, a shark in B.F.F. clothing who uses performative empathy to win over clients while gutting her opponents. Dern is brilliant at using her West Coast earnestness to give complicated characters a seductive shine. And we’re not through with the Year of Dern: she plays Mrs. March in Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” arriving on Christmas Day.