Oscars welcome the world: Last decade of acting champs hail from 8 different countries

Matthew Stewart
·3 min read
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By taking home the 2024 Best Actor Oscar for “Oppenheimer,” Cillian Murphy blazed a trail as the first Irish-born lead performer ever honored by the film academy. Prior to his victory, there had not been a native Irish acting winner in over 30 years nor any from his city of Cork, as the only earlier examples had involved supporting winners and fellow Dubliners Barry Fitzgerald (“Going My Way,” 1945) and Brenda Fricker (“My Left Foot,” 1990). His historic achievement brings the total number of different countries that have produced acting champs during the last decade to eight.

As has been the case throughout practically all of Oscars history, the United States is by far the dominant birthplace among the 2015-2024 acting winners. Of the group’s 37 unique members, 26 (or 70.3%) originate from there, including newly-crowned victors Emma Stone (“Poor Things”), Robert Downey Jr. (“Oppenheimer”), and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (“The Holdovers”). Stone (a previous winner for “La La Land,” 2017) is one of three American actors to bag two trophies within the last 10 years, following Mahershala Ali (“Moonlight,” 2017; “Green Book,” 2019) and Frances McDormand (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” 2018; “Nomadland,” 2021).

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Murphy follows seven other European performers who took home Oscars in the past decade. England – the second of two countries to produce multiple victors during this time – is home to Eddie Redmayne (“The Theory of Everything,” 2015), Mark Rylance (“Bridge of Spies,” 2016), Gary Oldman (“Darkest Hour,” 2018), Olivia Colman (“The Favourite,” 2019), and Daniel Kaluuya (“Judas and the Black Messiah,” 2021). That leaves Alicia Vikander (“The Danish Girl,” 2016) and Anthony Hopkins (“The Father,” 2021), who respectively represent Sweden and Wales.

Since the start of the 2020s, the all-time list of countries where at least one acting winner was born has grown from 27 to 30 with the additions of Korea (Youn Yuh-jung, “Minari,” 2021), Malaysia (Michelle Yeoh, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” 2023), and Vietnam (Ke Huy Quan, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), the first of which is also home to “Minari” nominee Steven Yeun.

These are three of seven countries that now boast at least one nominated actor apiece after producing none prior to 2015, the rest of which are Ethiopia (Ruth Negga, “Loving,” 2017), Eswatini (Richard E. Grant, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” 2019), Bulgaria (Maria Bakalova, “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” 2021), and Thailand (Hong Chau, “The Whale,” 2023).

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