Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series, Anthology Series, or a Motion Picture Made for Television

Nominees:
Taron Egerton (Black Bird)
Colin Firth (The Staircase)
Andrew Garfield (Under the Banner of Heaven)
Evan Peters (Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story)
Sebastian Stan (Pam & Tommy)

Taron Egerton – Black Bird
Welsh-born actor Taron Egerton is no stranger to the award-show beat. Already a Golden Globe winner for his electrifying portrayal of Elton John in Rocketman, he has also been nominated for a Grammy and a BAFTA for the same role. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Egerton went from portraying a sensitive and eccentric British singer to a macho Chicago drug dealer trying to elicit a confession from a suspected serial killer in the AppleTV+ series Black Bird. Egerton was eager for the challenge. “People tend to think of you as the last thing you did,” he told The New York Times. “They don’t want to take that risk on giving an actor a role that they’ve not seen them do a version of before.”

Colin Firth – The Staircase
Colin Firth gained international fame in the mid-1990’s playing an earnest and respectable Brit in romantic dramas and comedies like Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary. This may be why Firth’s convincing portrayal of novelist Michael Peterson, who is accused of murdering his wife Kathleen, played by Toni Collette, in the HBO Max crime saga The Staircase, was a bit of a shock for his co-stars. “We all freaked out at the Zoom readings,” co-star Parker Posey told The New Yorker.
Firth is a three-time Golden Globe nominee, having won the Best Actor – Drama award for his performance in The King’s Speech in 2011.

Andrew Garfield – Under the Banner of Heaven
Since his breakthrough performance in The Social Network, Andrew Garfield has had a highly successful career playing everyone from Spiderman to Jonathan Larson (in his Golden Globe-winning performance in Tick, Tick … Boom!). In Hulu’s Under the Banner of Heaven, the English and American actor plays the role of a Mormon detective whose relationship with the church is strained after a gruesome crime.
“[He’s] not flashy, a very solid dude, and internal,” Garfield told Variety. “ I wanted to play with that – be as internal as possible, and less expressive than I’ve been in recent projects. Not a musical theater writer [like Larson], but a Mormon detective; couldn’t get any further away from each other. I like a challenge.”

Evan Peters – Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story
Evan Peters has shown incredible range in his work, starring in disparate shows likeMare of Easttown, Pose, and American Horror Story. Still, like Andrew Garfield, Peters may have once been known for his work in the MCU (Peters plays Quicksilver).
But Peter’s latest project may, for better or worse, be what people will associate him with in the foreseeable future. Taking on the role of a notorious serial killer in the popular Netflix series Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Peters told The Hollywood Reporter that the performance required a lot of darkness and negativity. “It was just having that end goal in sight, knowing when we were going to wrap and finally being able to breathe and let it go and say, ‘Okay, now it’s time to bring in the joy and the lightness and watch comedies and romances and go back to St. Louis and see my family and friends and yeah, watch Stepbrothers,’” Peters said.

Sebastian Stan – Pam & Tommy
The third MCU star in this category, Sebastian Stan went from playing a one-armed anti-hero (aka The Winter Soldier) to one of the most famous tattoo-armed playboys of the 1990’s. Playing Tommy Lee in the Hulu series Pam & Tommy, Stan brought audiences back to a time when the world was obsessed with big hair, power ballads, and one particular power couple.
“At the end, everybody seemed very grateful and happy that people connected with the show,” Stan told Vanity Fair. “They sort of revisited the story, they saw it, took another look at it. And the conversation just continues. That’s what’s important.”