The best actors share a similar attitude towards acting: they’re total pros who often spend months preparing, reading about the character they portray. Usually, the real lives of these actors have little in common with these characters, yet they give everything to pull audiences in with their performances. Once in a while, though, there’s whatever happened in these five films, where the actors barely had to do any research because they’re living or have lived the plot.
Even though some of the writers wrote their scripts after hearing these actors’ experiences, the performances that emerged from these accidental collisions between fiction and real life became some of the most gut-wrenching in recent memory. That’s life imitating art, or more accurately, art catching life at just the right time.
1. Kumail Nanjiani – The Big Sick (2017)
The Big Sick is a heartwarming biopic about Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, Emily V. Gordon. And usually, biopics do this polite song-and-dance where the actor, often one who looks like the real person, plays the real-life figure. That was certainly not the case here because Nanjiani plays himself alongside Zoe Kazan, who plays his wife Emily, who herself co-wrote the script from her memory of being in a medically-induced coma for 8 days. Needless to say, there was no creative gap to bridge and no need for research or getting into character for Nanjiani. The result was an undiluted, honest portrayal of a love story people still talk about.
2. Scarlett Johansson – Marriage Story (2019)
When Noah Baumbach cast Scarlett Johansson in his 2019 divorce drama, she was right in the middle of her own divorce proceedings, including a messy custody dispute over her daughter Rose with ex-husband Romain Dauriac. She told reporters at Venice that the whole thing felt “fated,” and that absolutely tracks. She wasn’t just going through the motions during the brutal courtroom scenes between her character, Nicole, and Adam Driver‘s Charlie. And that’s because she didn’t have to draw from any abstract heartbreak memory. This explains why the movie earned several accolades, including six nominations at the 92nd Academy Awards, one for Best Actress for Johansson.
3. Andrew Garfield & Florence Pugh – We Live in Time (2024)
Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh didn’t have to imagine the grief their characters experienced in We Live in Time because both essentially had enough skin in the game to pull it off flawlessly. On his part, Garfield lost his mom to pancreatic cancer in 2019, and he’s been quite vocal about how he got the script when he was still privately wrestling with the same questions the film asks about dying on your own terms. He even went as far as admitting that making the film brought him healing. Pugh, on the other hand, had just been diagnosed with endometriosis and PCOS around the time the film was released. She’d also frozen her eggs as a result. That’s why Almut’s fertility arc (her character in the film) hit uncomfortably close to home for her. Ultimately, neither of them was faking that grief, and it showed.
4. Lady Gaga – A Star is Born (2018)
Lady Gaga plays the role of Ally Maine in this third remake of the 1937 romantic drama of the same title. What has since come to light is the fact that she filmed it while she was managing her mental health with lithium. She also said that doing so brought up several unwanted and buried memories, including getting raped at 19, developing PTSD, and spending years being told that she wasn’t pretty or bankable enough for the industry she was killing herself to break into. Fans of the movie know that’s exactly Ally’s backstory before she met Jack. When Ally was singing about finally being seen, about being enough, Gaga wasn’t acting so much as she was reliving past trauma. Then, after they wrapped up production, Lady Gaga had what she later described as a psychotic break that prompted her to cancel the last ten dates of her Joanne World Tour and seek psychiatric help.
5. Brendan Fraser – The Whale (2022)
So Charlie, the character at the center of The Whale, spends years hiding from the world after something broke him. He doesn’t know if coming back is even an option anymore. That storyline didn’t just sound familiar to Brendan Fraser; it was basically a recap of his life up to that point. After HFPA president Philip Berk groped him at a luncheon in 2003, Fraser’s career, in his own words to GQ, “withered on a vine.” He spent almost two decades mostly gone from Hollywood. Then The Whale happened. The Venice standing ovation went on for six whole minutes. And then the Oscar. Charlie was a guy trying to figure out if resurfacing was still possible. Turns out, for Fraser, it definitely was. And honestly? Nobody deserved that comeback more.
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