Print quote: The 2026 best actress category offers an unusually rich spectrum of female characters. For once, the roles avoid familiar clichés
The best actress race at the Academy Awards this year is a formidable one — a lineup of performances so varied and emotionally bruising that the category feels less like a competition and more like a gallery of complicated women.
Consider the company: Jessie Buckley delivers an exquisite performance as Agnes, the fiercely independent wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet. Rose Byrne strips herself emotionally bare as a mother on the brink in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Kate Hudson disappears into the role of Claire Sardina, a Milwaukee hairdresser turned Neil Diamond tribute singer in Song Sung Blue. And Renate Reinsve gives a sharp, unsettling performance as Nora Borg, an actress wrestling with grief and resentment in Sentimental Value.
Then there’s Emma Stone, an Oscar winner already, who finds herself nominated once again — this time for her icy, unsettling portrayal of Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceutical CEO in Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
What unites these performances is not their subject matter, but their complexity. The 2026 best actress category offers an unusually rich spectrum of female characters. For once, the roles avoid familiar clichés. Instead of the usual tragic muse or femme fatale, we get women navigating grief, ambition, resentment, maternal exhaustion and moral ambiguity. They’re messy, flawed, powerful and occasionally infuriating — which is precisely why they feel so real.
Stone’s role in Bugonia exemplifies that ambiguity. Continuing her creative partnership with Lanthimos following Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness and The Favourite, Stone plays Fuller, the razor-sharp CEO of a pharmaceutical empire. In a darkly satirical reinterpretation of the Korean cult film Save the Green Planet!, Fuller embodies the hyperefficient modern executive — a woman who believes productivity is paramount and people are merely instruments.
Her philosophy is chillingly pragmatic. Employees are told they don’t need to work after hours, but their assignments must be completed by morning. Optimisation is everything. Human frailty is an inconvenience. Stone plays Fuller with clinical precision: shaven head, huge, watchful eyes, a mind constantly calculating the next move.
The plot spirals into surreal territory when a conspiracy-obsessed man, played by Jesse Plemons, becomes convinced she’s an alien infiltrator bent on destroying humanity. What unfolds is a strange collision of corporate satire and psychological thriller, probing how alienation and online echo chambers can breed paranoia. Stone’s performance is magnetic — particularly when the all-powerful CEO suddenly finds herself powerless, forced to rely on wit and manipulation to survive.
If Stone represents ruthless authority, Byrne represents something altogether different: collapse. In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Byrne plays a psychologist whose life is slowly unravelling under the crushing weight of responsibility. Caring for a child with special needs while maintaining her career, she begins to disintegrate emotionally.
Director Mary Bronstein films Byrne’s breakdown with relentless intimacy, often locking the camera onto her face as exhaustion erodes her judgment. Byrne’s character makes terrible decisions — leaving her child unattended, arriving late for school pickups, spiralling into self-destructive habits — but the film makes clear that these failures are symptoms of a system that has left her entirely alone. Watching it is physically exhausting.
At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum sits Hudson’s performance in Song Sung Blue, a warm biographical drama about a struggling couple who form a Neil Diamond tribute act. Hudson plays Sardina, a woman who rediscovers purpose through music alongside her partner, played by Hugh Jackman. As the duo “Lightning and Thunder,” they navigate illness, financial hardship and personal setbacks, yet the film remains buoyant thanks to Hudson’s disarming sincerity — she even put on 15 pounds (6,8kg) and ditched her skincare routine.
Reinsve’s Borg in Sentimental Value, meanwhile, is less sympathetic. A grieving actress entangled in a fraught relationship with her estranged father — a film director who abandoned the family years earlier. Borg rejects the lead role he offers her out of spite, only to resent the American actress who accepts it instead. Reinsve makes the character simultaneously brittle and compelling.
Yet if one performance towers above the rest, it’s Buckley’s Agnes. As Shakespeare’s wife confronting the death of their son during the plague, Buckley delivers a performance of devastating emotional clarity. Her grief permeates every scene — sometimes erupting in anger, sometimes settling into quiet sorrow.
Agnes begins the film radiant with independence and sensuality, a woman who refuses to conform to the limitations of her era. But after tragedy strikes, that vitality becomes something darker. Her blame for her husband simmers beneath the surface until, in a final moment of recognition, she sees his grief reflected in the play Hamlet.
The shift in her expression — from bitterness to empathy — is almost unbearably moving.
Each actress has delivered a performance worthy of recognition. But if the Academy honours emotional truth above spectacle, Buckley’s portrayal of love, loss and forgiveness should carry the night.
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