Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy – Nominee

Nominees:
Lesley Manville (Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris)
Margot Robbie (Babylon)
Anya Taylor-Joy (The Menu)
Emma Thompson (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande)
Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once)

Lesley Manville – Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
English actress Lesley Manville got her first Golden Globe nomination for her role as Mrs. Ada Harris in the period comedy-drama film Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. The film, directed and produced by Anthony Fabian, is set in 1957 in London and tells the story of widowed cleaning lady Harris who is smitten with a client’s haute couture Dior dress. It motivates her to go to Paris and buy her own Dior frock when she receives her war widow’s pension. Manville, 66, told AARP what Paris meant to her character. She said, “She romanticized Paris, though when she gets there, she sees all this rubbish on the streets — the garbage collectors are on strike — so the bubble is burst a bit. But when she gets inside the house of Dior, the magic is all there. And it’s just like a kid in a sweet shop. There’s an innocence and a freshness about her, nothing like the very solid and stuffy woman she sits next to at the fashion shows.”

Margot Robbie – Babylon
The 32-year-old Australian actress was enrolled in a circus school by her mother, earned a certificate in trapeze at age 8, and studied drama at Somerset College. She received her third Golden Globe nomination with her portrayal of aspiring actress Nellie LaRoy in the epic comedy-drama written and directed by Damien Chazelle. The movie, which chronicles the rise and fall of multiple characters during Hollywood’s transition from silent to sound films in the late 1920s, also stars Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad, a silent film star noted for his decadent parties. In an interview with Metro, Robbie revealed that she watched a lot of the raucous antics of a group of twentysomethings led by Snooki in Jersey Shore, the reality TV show, to prepare for her role as wild party girl LaRoy. She said, “I watched a lot of that. Everyone who parties hard in their 20s, they have that husky voice – I had that husky voice when I partied too hard when I was younger. It’s such a sign of someone who is not taking care of themselves.”

Anya Taylor-Joy – The Menu
Golden Globe winner (2021) Anya Taylor-Joy of The Queen’s Gambit received a Golden Globe nomination for playing Margot Mills/Erin, an escort who accompanies her snooty client Tyler Ledford (Nicholas Hoult) in the dark comedy helmed by Mark Mylod, The Menu.
Born in Miami and raised in Buenos Aires and London, Taylor-Joy, 26, did an off-script move when her character found out that her date, Ledford, knew the bloody plan of Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). She told BBC Radio 1: “I get a lot of, like, ‘men doing really terrible things’ and women sitting silently while one tear slowly falls. I’m like, ‘Oh no, no, no, no, no. We get mad and angry.’”
She said to the online news site Tyla about her character: “I love the fact that Margot is completely unapologetic about who she is, what she does, and how she lives her life. She’s walking into this highly elitist, exclusionary space that is designed to make her feel as if she’s not worthy. “And rather than feeling unworthy, she’s like, calling BS on all of this, and I loved that about her.”

Emma Thompson – Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
Two-time Golden Globe winner Emma Thompson, who clinched her first professional role in1982, touring in a stage version of Not the Nine O’Clock News, received a Golden Globe nod for her role as the retired widow Nancy Stokes in the sex comedy Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. Directed by Sophie Hyde and written by Katy Brand, the film follows the recently widowed Stokes who was married for three decades and has not experienced an orgasm. She hires a young sex worker, Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), in hopes of self-discovery and learning from him what she has been missing all these years.
The 63-year-old thespian talked to The Cut about women and sex. She said, “Let’s remember that this is the first time Nancy has enjoyed sex. The film is really about someone who hasn’t enjoyed sex until her early 60s, when she’s decided that it’s time to get on board with something else, with unlocking whatever has prevented her.
“So, it’s partly about women not thinking that enjoying sex is for them or is important for them. We’re not encouraged, necessarily, to think about what it is we might want. We’re too busy thinking about what everyone else needs, or in a sexual situation, perhaps performing, so that the man feels like he’s doing a good job because it’s all about them.”

Michelle Yeoh – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Michelle Yeoh, who was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people and “Icon of the Year” in 2022, got her first Golden Globe nomination with her performance in the science fiction film Everything Everywhere All at Once. She is the first Malaysian Chinese actress to be nominated in this category. Yeoh, 60, appears as Evelyn Quan Wang, the overwhelmed mother and dissatisfied laundromat owner navigating the multiverse in the absurdist comedy which is co-directed and co-written by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as the Daniels). The role was originally conceived by the Daniels for Jackie Chan but was later reworked and offered to Yeoh. In an episode of Variety’s Actors on Actors, Yeoh told Cate Blanchett that she told the filmmakers that she would not do the film if they did not change the name of her character. She said, “The only thing I said to them was, ‘The character cannot be called Michelle Wang.’ They’re like, ‘But why? It’s so you.’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m not an Asian immigrant mother who’s running a laundromat. She needs her own voice.’ That was the only thing. I’m like, ‘If you don’t change the name, I’m not coming in.’”