Guessing Game: The First Roles of Each Oscar Nominee!
Monday, January 26, 2026 at 4:33PM by Nathaniel R
Leonardo DiCaprio's debut film "CRITTERS 3"
A spot of guessing game fun today. Some Oscar nominees are movie stars from the jump but most actors have to build their careers up slowly increasing the size and quality of their roles over the years until their awards breakthrough. 5 of our current 20 nominees across Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Supporting Actor kicked off their feature film career with a leading role. Can you guess who they were? Even more difficult can you pair each nominated actor with the name of their first credited feature film character? The answers to this quiz are after the jump but first jot down your guesses and see how many you can get right before looking...
| In Their Feature Film Debut They Played a Character Named... | The Current Oscar Nominees |
| 1) Alex Dwyer | A) Jessie Buckley |
| 2) Ben Crandall (LEAD) | B) Rose Byrne |
| 3) Danny Vance | C) Timothée Chalamet |
| 4) Drug Kingpin | D) Benicio Del Toro |
| 5) Duke the Dog-Faced Boy | E) Leonardo DiCaprio |
| 6) Erik (LEAD) | F) Jacob Elordi |
| 7) Josh | G) Elle Fanning |
| 8) Jules | H) Ethan Hawke |
| 9) Lucy (2 Years) | I) Kate Hudson |
| 10) Moll (LEAD) | J) Michael B Jordan |
| 11) Rafi |
K) Inga Ibsdottir Lilleas |
| 12) Rastus Sommers | L) Delroy Lindo |
| 13) Rena | M) Amy Madigan |
| 14) Renate | N) Wunmi Mosaku |
| 15) Rooster | O) Wagner Moura |
| 16) Seema | P) Sean Penn |
| 17) Sigrid Auge (LEAD) | Q) Renate Reinsve |
| 18) Skye Davidson | R) Stellan Skarsgard |
| 19) Teen #2 | S) Emma Stone |
| 20) Terry Jean Moore (LEAD) | T) Teyana Taylor |
THE ANSWERS ARE AFTER THE JUMP...
Got your guesses ready? Tell us how you did once you've read the answers...
Tom Cruise, Timothy Hutton, and Sean Penn all very early in their careers in TAPS (1981)
1:P - Sean Penn was a supporting player (along with another intense unknown named "Tom Cruise") in Taps (1981), a vehicle for freshly Oscared Timothy Hutton from Ordinary People, about students at a military academy. Here Sean is again 44 years later as another military man! Incidentally this very same year Sean Penn filmed The Beaver Kid #2, which had a budget of $100 and was a dramatization of an earlier doc short about an Olivia Newton-John obsessed drag queen in Utah. If you ever get a chance to see The Beaver Trilogy (2001) a doc compilation of three film vignettes on this topic, you really must jump and do so. Unforgettable oddity with the added bonus of famous Hollywood actors (Crispin Glover is also in it)
2:H - Ethan Hawke kicked off his film career top billed as "Ben Crandall" in the kids sci-fi adventure film Explorers (1985). River Phoenix was second billed (though a lot of internet imagery reverses that --probably because River Phoenix's star grew more quickly than Hawke's in the subsequent years). The trio was rounded out by Jason Presson. Presson's career never exploded and he quit acting in the 1990s but it started off strongly -- he had co-starred with Glenn Close and Robert Duvall a year earlier in the grief drama The Stone Boy.
3:C - Timothee Chalamet's first credited film role was the minor role of "Danny Vance" in Jason Reitman's flop Men, Women, and Children (2014).
4:L - Delroy Lindo's first credited movie character at 24 years of age was in the Canadian corporate thriller Partners (1976). He didn't have a name, just a profession: Drug Kingpin.
5:D - Benicio Del Toro wins cool points (what else is new) for his first credited character. He was the circus
performer "Duke, the Dog-Faced Boy" in Big Top Pee Wee (1988)
Stellan Skarsgård was a leading man at first before he became a ubiquitous international character actor
6:R - Stellan Skarsgård kicked off his film career at 21 years of age starring in the 'Naked Shock!' of the Swedish film Raid in Summer (1972). (The birth of his eldest and most famous son Alexander Skarsgård, was four years away.) His international career began in his late 30s via The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and The Hunt For Red October (1990) but he wisely never gave up Nordic cinema despite the increasing fame.
7:E - Dicaprio's first feature film role after a handful of TV appearances was the supporting role of "Josh" in the horror comedy Critters 3 (1991) which went direct-to-video - the shot above is from the trailer when a guy tells him "You're not as smart as you think you are!" How wrong that guy was! Just two years later for his second and third films Leo was instantly a very big deal winning 'promising newcomer!' raves in the spring for This Boy's Life opposite Robert DeNiro in the summer and chasing that with an Oscar nomination for What's Eating Gilbert Grape the following winter shortly after he turned 19.
8:S - Emma Stone was a scene stealer from the jump via "Jules" in Superbad (2007)
9:G - Elle Fanning played a younger version of Dakota Fanning's co-lead role in I Am Sam (2001) -- I'm
guessing a lot of you guessed this one on the age of the character alone!
10:A - Jessie Buckley won raves for her film debut as the leading lady of Beast (2011) winning the BIFA for "Most Promising Newcomer" and the London Film Critics Circle Award for Best British/Irish Actress
11:O - Wagner Moura's first big screen role was the small part of "Rafi" in the Brazil/San Francisco set Penelope Cruz vehicle Woman on Top (2000) about a sultry Brazilian chef.
12:B - Rose Byrne kicked off her movie career with a supporting role in an Australian comedy called Dallas Doll (1994) which starred comedienne Sandra Bernhard.
13:T - Teyana Taylor was already known as a singer when she made her feature debut in Stomp the Yard 2: Homecoming (2010) as "Rena" but that side of her career didn't truly ignite until her revelatory star turn in A Thousand and One (2023).
14:Q - Renate Reinsve played "Renate" (a stretch!) in a small role in the excellent suicidal drama Oslo August 31. Writer/director Joachim Trier became such a fan that he wrote Worst Person in the World (2021) expressly for her; It changed her life.
15:F - Jacob Elordi played the small role of "Rooster" in the Australian comedy Swinging Safari (2018) which starred Australian icons Guy Pearce and Kylie Minogue.
16:N - Wunmi Mosaku played "Seema" in a film called Honeymooner (2010). I'm not fully sure this is accurate as "first" but IMDb lists it as the earliest. My confusion is because she had three movies in quick succession so which was her debut? The others were I Am Slave - a leading role -- and a supporting role in the Eva Green sci-fi drama Womb. Mosaku's career really took off ten years later with the one-two punch of amazing supporting work in the shortlived but much-discussed HBO series Lovecraft Country (2020) and her BAFTA nominated lead role in His House (2020)
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas started off strong in the Norwegian comedy "Women in Oversized Men's Dress Shirts"
17:K - Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas started her career off top billed and received a Best Actress Amanda Award nomination (Norway's top film prize). The movie was Women in Oversized Men's Shirts (2015). But she didn't receive any international attention until Sentimental Value.
18:I - Kate Hudson had an uncredited role at 12 years of age as "Choir Singer" in Home Alone 2 (1992) but her first credited appearance was at 19 years of age in a film called Desert Blue (1998) as Skye Davidson.
19:J - Michael B Jordan first started winning critical attention as a very strong teen actor in the first season of the wildly admired HBO drama The Wire (2002) but in his first feature film, James Toback's indie Black and White, (1999) he was merely "Teen #2"
20:M - Amy Madigan may be known as a quintessential "Supporting" Actress (her first Oscar nomination was 40 years earlier in the same category she reappears in for Weapons) but after a couple of tv movies she actually kicked off her feature career role as Terry Jean Moore the protagonist of Love Child (1972) a true story drama about a woman who was imprisoned for years due to petty theft and fights to keep the child she had in prison by one of her jailors.
Crazy look-back right? Careers are so long and they have so many unexpected detours, false starts, inauspicious beginnings, or things that don't feel important at all until they suddenly become so years later.
Hope you enjoyed!
Reader Comments (2)
OMG Swinging Safari is fun and incredibly silly, but now I'll have to rewatch it, because I don't remember Elordi in it at all! Also starring Radha Mitchell, Julian McMahon and Richard Roxburgh (as the narrator) btw
Typo on Love Child, it's 1982 not 1972. Madigan got a "new star" GG nom in 1983 for it.