Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama
Nominees:
Austin Butler (Elvis)
Brendan Fraser (The Whale)
Hugh Jackman (The Son)
Bill Nighy (Living)
Jeremy Pope (The Inspection)
Austin Butler
Austin Butler is nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal of music legend Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. The pressure of playing the “King of Rock and Roll” led the now 31-year-old American actor to fully immerse himself in the process.
“I basically put the rest of my life on pause for two years,” said Austin Butler at a press conference at Toronto International Film Festival. “I just absorbed everything that I possibly could, and I just went down the rabbit hole of obsession.”
Elvis focuses on the complicated relationship between Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) and Elvis Presley. It sees Elvis’ rise to fame through Parker’s point of view and spans over two decades till his death in 1977.
“I broke down his life into periods of time where I could hear the differences in how his voice changed over the years and how his movement changed over the years, and I just spent two years studying and trying to find his humanity as much as I could through that,” he said.
Brendan Fraser
Brendan Fraser’s performance in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale earned him his Golden Globe nomination. He plays a reclusive teacher, who is living on his own with severe obesity, when he seeks to reconnect with his daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink), whom he lost touch with after his divorce from her mother.
“It’s important to note that Charlie’s physical mobility is limited to his home space, which is his couch,” said Brendan Fraser at a press conference at the Venice Film Festival. “His story is told behind closed doors, and he’s a light in a dark space. I think it’s poetic that the trauma he carries is manifest in the physical weight of his body.”
Preparing for the role, Brendan Fraser said he received input from the Obesity Action Coalition in order to realistically and respectfully portray what it is like living with severe obesity.

Hugh Jackman
Hugh Jackman is nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance in Florian Zeller’s The Son.  The 54-year-old Australian actor plays a father, Peter, whose son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) has a hard time coping after his divorce from his mother Kate (Laura Dern).
When the parents discover that their son is seriously depressed and he comes to live with his father and his new wife (Vanessa Kirby) and their baby son, Peter is forced to look at his own relationship with his father (Anthony Hopkins) and discover abandonment issues of his own.
“When I read The Son, it was a feeling like a fire in my gut,” said Hugh Jackman at a press conference in Venice. “It was a compulsion. It’s a scary feeling to have. It’s a beautiful feeling. You rarely get it as an actor, where you feel that the part is right for you at this point in your life and you just must play it.”

Bill Nighy
Bill Nighy is nominated for a Golden Globe for his role in Oliver Hermanus’ Living. In the remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film To Live, Bill Nighy plays a buttoned up civil servant Mr. Williams, who receives a cancer diagnosis with an expected one year left to live. Discovering that he has not lived life to the fullest, he decides to fulfill one goal before he passes; to defeat the bureaucracy and help local mothers build a modest little children’s playground.
“I see him as a heroic figure,” Bill Nighy said at the press conference at Sundance. “I know that if you went to a modern psychiatrist, they would say he’s a complete and utter repressed mess. But I’m drawn to that probably as a repressed mess myself, but I do think there’s a kind of heroism.”

Jeremy Pope
Jeremy Pope is nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Ellis French in Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection.
The Inspection is an autobiographical piece by Bratton and Jeremy Pope plays the leading role as a young homeless, queer man, who decides to join the Marines during the ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ era partly to escape homelessness, but even more so to earn the respect of his homophobic mother (Gabrielle Union).
“I’d never been directed by a black queer man who was going, “I see you; I feel you; I know where you’re coming from, we don’t have to talk about it,” and that was very safe,” said Jeremy Pope about working with director Elegance Bratton at the New York Film Festival. “So, to be a part of that experience, I felt like for me, this project was about me being a vessel for something bigger.”