Actor With The Best Career- Adam Driver, Andrew Garfield, Jonah Hill.

These three actors I feel have had the best careers in their generation (Gen Y, born between 1980 and 1995). I should clarify that having the best career doesn’t mean, being the best actor. There are other actors that may have delivered better performances. I consider the ‘best career’ to be a balance between giving good performances but also being widely seen and having the opportunity to work with highly regarded directors and actors. What do you think?

All three actors are born in the same year (1983) and each has been lucky enough to work with great directors. My opinion is biased towards American movies and I should declare that my favourite director is Martin Scorsese, so that is why I consider these young actors to be without peer as having had the best career in their generation. They have each been attached to franchises (Driver with Star Wars, Garfield with Spiderman, Hill with Jump Street) but have also found the time to work in critically acclaimed movies. In Hill’s case, he has used his public profile from the Apatow comedies to make interesting movies. In Garfield’s case, he took a risk to expand his popular appeal after critical acclaim by taking on Spiderman.

Let’s start with Driver, the one whose rise is perhaps the most recent. He worked with Clint Eastwood in ‘J. Edgar’, Steven Spielberg in ‘Lincoln’ then the Coen Brothers in ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’, Jim Jarmusch in ‘Paterson’, Martin Scorsese in ‘Silence’ and potentially Terry Gilliam in ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’ (assuming that gets made). He has also worked with good genre film directors, JJ Abrams in Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens and Rian Johnson in the upcoming Star Wars and is also set to work with Soderberg in ‘Logan Lucky’.

Garfield’s early career had perhaps the strongest performance with ‘Boy A’ directed by John Crowley. Unlike Driver and Hill, Garfield was elevated to leading roles quickly. He worked with Terry Gilliam in ‘The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus’ followed by working with Mark Romanek in ‘Never Let Me Go’ then David Fincher in perhaps his most widely seen dramatic performance, ‘The Social Network’ for which he arguably deserved an Oscar nomination. His performances slowed with his appearance in the Spiderman series but he returned with ’99 Homes’ by little-known director, Ramin Bahrani. This proved to give his career a much needed an injection and he now has leading roles in the Mel Gibson film, ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ and ‘Silence’ by Martin Scorsese (with Driver).

Jonah Hill is the unlikely star. His breakthrough role in ‘Superbad’ saw him get people’s attention, but not as fast as his co-stars Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse whose star subsequently faded after a string of blockbusters immediately post ‘Superbad’. Jonah Hill worked steadily in Judd Apatow comedies. He tried his luck in the somewhat serious title role in Duplass-brothers directed comedy, ‘Cyrus’ and raised his profile with the successful comedy ‘Get Him To The Greek’. He could have kept on doing comedy indefinitely, had he not chose to work with the acclaimed director Bennett Miller in ‘Moneyball’ which earned him an Oscar nomination. Afterwards he got to be part of a franchise with ’21 Jump Street’ yet he continued working with interesting directors such as Quentin Tarantino, in a small role in ‘Django Unchained’, alongside his regular comedies. ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ directed by Martin Scorsese showed that his dramatic turn in ‘Moneyball’ was not a fluke, as he got another Oscar nomination. He has since worked with the Coen Brothers (once again in a small part) in ‘Hail, Caesar!’. Hill looks set to reteam with his ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘The Devil in the White City’ or ‘The Ballad of Richard Jewell’ which are being eyed by Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and David Fincher.

Honourable mentions to Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jesse Eisenberg. Oscar Isaac also deserves a mention, though he is slightly older.