Year in Review: Actors with amazing chemistry
by Nathaniel R
Remember all those years ago when the Mystic River (2003) team was trying to fight Lord of the Rings for the Oscar and trying a variation of “actors are the best special effects” as its campaign angle? That’s always been true even though those Hobbits deserved the win (if you think those movies would have been half as good without Elijah Wood’s purity and awe or Viggo’s resigned gravitas or Sir Ian’s commanding wit think again). In 2019 Avengers Endgame wouldn’t have obsessed the world so much if the core group of actors hadn’t spent the last decade building-up the love and squabbles of this superpowered chosen family. Similarly Captain Marvel benefitted early in the year from a fun chemistry between Brie Larson and Samuel L Jackson, the actress bringing out a new, or at least revived, energy in Jackson’s umpteenth return to Nick Fury. Sometimes animosity is its own kind of chemistry, setting off dangerous sparks. Don’t you wish there were more scenes of Al Pacino and Stephen Graham as mouthy rivals in The Irishman, ice cream sundaes and all?
Chemistry is the magic and impossible-to-fake ingredient that elevates any human interaction to its most evolved form, including the fictional ones. Our “best onscreen chemistry” list begins with fascinatingly lop-sided relationships...
FAVOURITE EXAMPLES OF CO-STAR CHEMISTRY THIS YEAR