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15 Actresses Who Can Play Any Role

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These actresses can do anything.

Nazarii Verbitskiy

Entertainment - May 15th 2026, 22:00 GMT+2

15. Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Johansson built a career out of refusing to sit in one lane for too long. She can make blockbuster action look sleek in *Black Widow*, turn near-silence into a whole emotional weather system in *Lost in Translation*, and somehow make a voice-only performance in *Her* feel more present than most actors with full lighting and costumes. Then *Marriage Story* arrives, and suddenly all that cool mystique gets stripped down to raw, messy heartbreak. Not many stars can sell alien detachment, bruised realism, and Marvel banter without looking like they changed personalities at the airport. | © Marvel Studios

14. Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence became a franchise icon with *The Hunger Games*, then immediately made it annoying for anyone trying to box her in. Katniss Everdeen needed grit, exhaustion, anger, and a face that could sell rebellion without speeches, while *Silver Linings Playbook* asked her to turn chaos into rhythm. Add *Winter’s Bone*, *American Hustle*, *Mother!*, and *No Hard Feelings*, and the pattern gets harder to ignore: she can be raw, absurd, guarded, explosive, or wonderfully ridiculous. Her best performances feel slightly dangerous, like the scene might start behaving differently just because she entered it. | © Apple TV

13. Sandra Bullock

Sandra Bullock has the rare gift of making extreme situations feel weirdly human, whether she is trapped in space in *Gravity*, dodging explosions in *Speed*, or stumbling through pageant chaos in *Miss Congeniality*. Comedy has always loved her timing, but her dramatic work in *The Blind Side* and *Bird Box* proved she was never just the charming neighbor with better hair than everyone else. She knows how to play panic without losing control, warmth without turning sugary, and toughness without acting like she wandered in from a different movie. | © Paramount Pictures

12. Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway’s career has survived one of the strangest problems an actress can have: people forgetting how good she is because she makes difficult work look too polished. *The Princess Diaries* gave her an effortless comic foundation, but *Rachel Getting Married*, *Les Misérables*, and *The Dark Knight Rises* pulled completely different muscles. She can go grand, brittle, glamorous, wounded, awkward, or theatrical without losing the intelligence behind the performance. Even when the internet temporarily decided to be weird about her, the screen kept making the better argument. | © Focus Features

11. Emily Blunt

Emily Blunt can weaponize a raised eyebrow, which already puts her ahead of half the industry. *The Devil Wears Prada* turned her into a scene-stealer with a handful of acidic lines, but *Sicario* and *A Quiet Place* showed how well she handles dread, exhaustion, and moral pressure. Then she jumps into *Mary Poppins Returns*, *Edge of Tomorrow*, and *Oppenheimer*, and the whole résumé starts looking suspiciously unfair. Blunt’s trick is precision: she never seems to push harder than needed, yet the camera keeps finding the exact emotional bruise. | © Universal Studios

10. Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett acts like someone who found the secret menu for screen presence. She can be icy and majestic in *Elizabeth*, terrifyingly controlled in *Tár*, unrecognizable in *I’m Not There*, and wickedly funny in *Thor: Ragnarok* without making any of those choices feel like career tourism. Even in fantasy, melodrama, satire, or prestige drama, she brings a strange authority that makes the world bend around her. Blanchett does not just enter roles; she seems to redesign the room, adjust the temperature, and then pretend it was always that way. | © MUBI

9. Michelle Williams

Michelle Williams does not need fireworks to leave damage behind. In *Blue Valentine* and *Manchester by the Sea*, she turns restraint into something almost unbearable, letting small pauses carry more weight than most dramatic speeches. Then *My Week with Marilyn* proves she can step into a famous silhouette without turning the role into wax museum cosplay, while *The Fabelmans* gives her a bigger, more openly theatrical canvas. Her versatility is quiet but sharp; she can play fragility, glamour, frustration, and emotional danger without ever announcing the switch. | © Amazon Studios

8. Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman’s filmography looks like someone kept daring her to choose harder assignments. *Léon: The Professional* introduced her with startling confidence, *Black Swan* demanded physical obsession and psychological collapse, and *Jackie* turned a public figure into something intimate, jagged, and strange. She can handle sci-fi spectacle in *Star Wars*, comic-book scale in *Thor*, and bruising realism in *Closer* without flattening everything into one movie-star mode. Portman often plays characters under pressure, but the pressure always lands differently: sometimes elegant, sometimes feral, sometimes quietly poisonous. | © Marvel Studios

7. Saoirse Ronan

Saoirse Ronan has been giving old-soul performances since an age when most actors are still trying to look natural holding a prop. *Atonement* made her impossible to ignore, *Brooklyn* gave her a delicate immigrant coming-of-age story, and *Lady Bird* let her be funny, selfish, loving, and unbearable in ways that felt painfully familiar. She can move from period drama to modern comedy to thriller without dragging the same performance behind her. Ronan’s face does a lot of work, but the real skill is how precisely she controls what it reveals. | © Apple TV+

6. Jessica Chastain

Jessica Chastain has a talent for playing intensity without turning every character into the same clenched-jaw warrior. *Zero Dark Thirty* gave her chilly determination, *The Help* revealed a sweeter and more wounded register, and *The Eyes of Tammy Faye* let her go big without losing the sadness under the makeup. She can command political thrillers, horror in *Mama* and *It Chapter Two*, domestic drama in *Scenes from a Marriage*, and science fiction in *Interstellar* and *The Martian*. Chastain’s best roles feel driven by people who have already decided the cost is worth it. | © Greenwich Entertainment

Meryl Streep Doubt — 5. Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep’s reputation is so large that it can almost get in the way of watching the actual work. Look past the legend, though, and the variety is still ridiculous: *Sophie’s Choice*, *The Devil Wears Prada*, *Doubt*, *Julie & Julia*, *Mamma Mia!*, *The Iron Lady*. She can disappear into accents, manners, comedy rhythms, moral severity, and full musical abandon, often with an ease that makes everyone else look like they brought homework to a knife fight. Calling her versatile feels accurate, but also a little underdressed for the occasion. | © Miramax Films

4. Julianne Moore

Julianne Moore can make emotional collapse feel lived-in rather than performed, which is why her best scenes rarely look like Oscar clips begging for attention. *Boogie Nights* gave her warmth and sadness inside a chaotic ensemble, *Far from Heaven* leaned into classic melodrama with a modern ache, and *Still Alice* turned cognitive decline into something devastatingly precise. She can be funny, severe, sensual, strange, maternal, cruel, or fragile without changing the honesty of her screen presence. Moore never seems to chase the dramatic moment; she lets it catch up to her. | © Netflix

3. Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman has spent decades making elegance look unstable, which is far more interesting than simply looking elegant. *Moulin Rouge!* gave her old-school movie-star sparkle, *The Others* sharpened her into gothic terror, and *Rabbit Hole* stripped everything down to grief that refuses easy comfort. She can be chilly, absurd, seductive, haunted, funny, or completely unguarded, sometimes in the same project. From *To Die For* to *Big Little Lies*, Kidman keeps finding women whose surfaces are immaculate and whose interiors are one cracked glass away from disaster. | © A24

2. Margot Robbie

Margot Robbie turned a breakout role in *The Wolf of Wall Street* into the beginning of a much stranger and smarter career than the industry probably expected. *I, Tonya* gave her a sharp, bruised, darkly funny showcase, *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood* asked for luminous restraint, and *Barbie* required satire, sincerity, physical comedy, and existential crisis in heels. Even Harley Quinn could have been a one-note chaos machine, but Robbie gave her timing, damage, and oddball charm. She plays star power like a tool, not a personality setting. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

1. Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton often looks like she arrived from a more stylish planet and decided to study human behavior through cinema. That could have become a gimmick, except the work keeps backing it up: *Michael Clayton*, *Orlando*, *We Need to Talk About Kevin*, *Snowpiercer*, *Only Lovers Left Alive*, and *Doctor Strange* all ask for wildly different energies. She can be aristocratic, monstrous, weary, comic, mysterious, or almost ghostlike, and she rarely seems trapped by realism. Swinton’s greatest advantage is that she makes the unusual feel completely matter-of-fact. | © Sony Pictures Classics

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A bad wig, a courtroom monologue, a monster movie, a prestige biopic, a superhero paycheck — the real test is whether the performance still feels alive. The actresses here don’t survive genre-hopping by sanding off their edges; they make each shift look like a private joke between them and the camera. One role asks for elegance, the next asks for rot, rage, slapstick, or absolute stillness, and somehow the same face keeps finding a new temperature. Range is an overused word, but with these performers, it earns its rent.

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A bad wig, a courtroom monologue, a monster movie, a prestige biopic, a superhero paycheck — the real test is whether the performance still feels alive. The actresses here don’t survive genre-hopping by sanding off their edges; they make each shift look like a private joke between them and the camera. One role asks for elegance, the next asks for rot, rage, slapstick, or absolute stillness, and somehow the same face keeps finding a new temperature. Range is an overused word, but with these performers, it earns its rent.