Naomi Watts is one of the most emotionally courageous actresses of her generation, a performer whose willingness to be exposed and undone on screen has produced some of the most viscerally affecting work in twenty-first century film. She broke through with Mulholland Drive (2001) and went on to a career that includes The Ring (2002), 21 Grams (2003), King Kong (2005), and The Impossible (2012). Her two Academy Award nominations arrived within a decade of each other and reflected a run of work built almost entirely on the willingness to go further into a scene than the script required and stay there longer than comfort allowed.

On screen, Watts operates with a rawness that makes the camera feel intrusive in the best possible way, and the performances she is most celebrated for ask her to fall apart in public with a specificity that feels documentary rather than dramatized. The blue eyes, the fine-boned face, and a physicality that can read as fragile and then suddenly as something much harder give her a screen presence that resists predictability at every turn. She remains one of the most interesting actresses working at any budget level.