Although the Star Wars fanbase was divided by Disney’s handling of the next chapter of the Skywalker saga, everybody could agree that the cast was incredible. From Oscar Isaac to Adam Driver to John Boyega to Lupita Nyong’o, the Star Wars sequels featured some of the greatest actors working today.
Daisy Ridley and Kelly Marie Tran are relatively new to the scene and, since appearing in Star Wars made them instantly recognizable, all of their movies have been highly publicized. The trilogy’s more seasoned cast members, like Laura Dern and Andy Serkis, have a filmography full of hidden gems.
Andy Serkis: The Adventures Of Tintin (2011)
Steven Spielberg animated The Adventures of Tintin with performance-capture technology, so Andy Serkis was obviously recruited for the cast. He plays Captain Haddock alongside Jamie Bell’s Tintin.
The movie is a spot-on adaptation of the source material. Hopefully, the long-gestating sequel set to be directed by Peter Jackson will eventually get made.
Benicio Del Toro: The Way Of The Gun (2000)
Long before Christopher McQuarrie reinvigorated the Mission: Impossible franchise with Rogue Nation and then even more so with Fallout, he made his directorial debut with The Way of the Gun.
Stylishly mixing in influences from gangster movies, westerns, and “gun fu” actioners, The Way of the Gun stars Benicio del Toro (aka DJ from The Last Jedi) and Ryan Phillippe as a pair of decidedly unsympathetic criminal drifters.
Lupita Nyong’o: Little Monsters (2019)
Lupita Nyong’o was widely praised in 2019 for her dual performance as Adelaide Wilson and her “Tethered” doppelganger Red in Jordan Peele’s Us, but another horror movie she made that year went mostly unnoticed.
Abe Forsythe’s Little Monsters is a darkly comedic zombie movie in which Nyong’o plays a kindergarten teacher desperately trying to protect a group of children from a horde of the undead.
Carrie Fisher: The ‘Burbs (1989)
Between playing Princess Leia and being one of the best authors around, Carrie Fisher squeezed in a couple of unforgettable supporting performances in comedies like When Harry Met Sally throughout the ‘80s. One of the decade’s more underappreciated efforts was The ‘Burbs, a horror-comedy directed by Gremlins’ Joe Dante.
Tom Hanks plays a guy who uncovers a spooky conspiracy in his neighborhood during his week off. He tries to convince his family he’s onto something, but they just think he’s dangerously bored.
Domhnall Gleeson: Frank (2014)
While the role of General Hux didn’t give him much of a chance to show off his range, Domhnall Gleeson has proven his versatility as an actor in such acclaimed movies as Ex Machina, mother!, and The Revenant. Back in 2014, Gleeson starred in the little-seen treasure Frank with Michael Fassbender.
Lenny Abrahamson directed Frank from a script co-written by Jon Ronson based on his own newspaper article. Gleeson plays a wannabe musician who joins a band led by an eccentric performer (Fassbender) who wears a giant paper-mâché head similar to Frank Sidebottom.
Adam Driver: Paterson (2016)
Since the Star Wars sequels have made him an internationally recognized talent, Adam Driver has been one of the hardest-working actors in Hollywood, appearing in recent Oscar-winning gems like BlacKkKlansman and Marriage Story.
One great Driver movie that slipped under the radar a few years ago was Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, a heartfelt drama about a bus driver in New Jersey who enjoys a mundane life and indulges his gift for poetry in his spare time.
Laura Dern: Wild At Heart (1990)
Before playing Holdo and coining the most controversial maneuver in Star Wars history, Laura Dern had made a bunch of great movies with David Lynch, from Blue Velvet to Inland Empire.
One of the duo’s most underrated efforts is Wild at Heart, a surreal road trip movie starring Dern and Nicolas Cage as Lula and Sailor, respectively, two lovers who go on the run when Lula’s jealous, overbearing mother sends hitmen to kill Sailor.
Harrison Ford: The Conversation (1974)
As one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Harrison Ford doesn’t have a lot of underrated movies. Even the ones that initially bombed at the box office, like Blade Runner, have eventually been reassessed as classics. Having said that, Ford had a small role in Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid post-Watergate surveillance thriller The Conversation, which remains an underrated gem.
Along with Apocalypse Now and the first two Godfather movies, The Conversation is a Coppola effort that ranks alongside the greatest films ever made.
John Boyega: Attack The Block (2011)
Before Finn was John Boyega’s most famous role, his calling card as an actor was Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block. He plays a gang member contending with an alien invasion on the streets of London.
Nick Frost plays a local drug dealer and Jodie Whittaker plays a nurse that the gang initially harasses and later teams up with to fight the aliens.
Oscar Isaac: The Two Faces Of January (2014)
The popularity of Poe Dameron finally brought Oscar Isaac movies like Inside Llewyn Davis the attention they deserved. But some of Isaac’s best films are still underappreciated.
Hossein Amini, the screenwriter behind Drive, made his directorial debut with The Two Faces of January, is a tense three-hander that pits Isaac against Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst when the trio gets swept up in the death of a private investigator.