r/movies • u/Fun_Protection_6939 • 1d ago

Discussion What is the single greatest acting performance you have seen?

What is the single greatest acting performance you have seen?

It's got to be Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice for me. Such a heartbreaking and nuanced portrayal of loss and devastation, and doubly impressive because she had to learn two languages fluently and had to speak German with a Polish accent, when neither language was native to her.

499 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

28

u/pbspry 1d ago

For me there is no other answer. I've never, ever, experienced anything like DDL's performance in this film. He absolutely inhabited every square inch of Plainview's bone and sinew, to a degree I didn't think would even be possible for an actor to achieve.

I have many actors I love, but DDL is on a tier all of his own.

4

u/thehecticepileptic 1d ago

I feel the same. Especially after watching an interview with him on YouTube and thinking “this is the same human?” There’s just nothing to give away that it’s DDL acting, he just completely disappeared in the role, something I had never seen before TWBB.

5

u/zaminDDH 1d ago

He's so good that the characters he portrays sometimes feel more real than many people I actually know in real life. It feels less like acting and more like he's riding another person's life and they happened to have a camera on him for awhile.