Owen Wilson

Films: Bottle Rocket, The Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch

Best Role: Bottle Rocket

Notes: Anderson’s first writing partner. Wilson is one of the only actors that’s given rope to be consistently strange and surprising in his readings and deliveries, not beholden to what has become a kind of house acting style of soul-weary pain via loss delivered in monotone.

As Dignan in Bottle Rocket, he’s the source code for the Anderson cinematic universe, a moron trying to use the bonds of friendship and cobbled-together family to force order on chaos, even as he serves as a chaos agent upsetting the “natural” order of life. Dignan is a dictator along the lines of what Anderson has been characterized as on set, what you have to be to maintain his painterly frames (and characterized himself as in a classic AmEx commercial).

Bill Murray

Films: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Life Aquatic, Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The French Dispatch

Best Role: Rushmore

Notes: Hard to say where Wes Anderson or Bill Murray would be in culture if either man hadn’t made the decision to gamble on one another in 1998 with Bottle Rocket. Murray took a 1990s SAG day rate, what Anderson estimates around $9,000 total for the film that would reimagine both the filmmaker and star’s career and lives.

Luke Wilson

Films: Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums

Best Role: The Royal Tenenbaums

Notes: It’s somehow been 22 years since Wes Anderson has made a film with his first protagonist. Luke was the soul and early anchor of Anderson’s early films. If Owen Wilson comes off as a force of personality practically making you like him and follow his orders, Luke is the clinically depressed homecoming king. You inherently want to follow him and believe in his decency. In his masterpiece performance, he’s a broken fount of warmth and forgiveness, free from the petty resentments that plague the rest of his family, and yet the most fucked-up and damaged of them all. It’s one of the very best performances of the ’90s, and the third-best performance ever in an Anderson film.

Anjelica Huston

Films: The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch

Best Role: The Royal Tenenbaums

Notes: The women in Anderson’s early films were often the same archetype: an idealized, cryptic and beautiful object with dramatic eye makeup for men to project their damage onto and compete over.

Huston is the lone exception, the distant mother figure, not quite as remote and withholding as the rest of Anderson’s cavalcade of withholding and remote (often dead) parents. Anderson perfectly capitalizes on her gravitas, her royal cinematic bloodline, our relationship with her decades spanning equal parts severe and gorgeous image that demands a camera to capture it, as the estranged matriarch and ex-wife of his cinematic universe.

Adrien Brody

Films: The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City

Best Role: Grand Budapest Hotel

Notes: You run out of ways to say an actor was “made for Wes Anderson,” but just look at his delicate, aristocratic features, his angular frame, his voice. His first Anderson role begins with him outsprinting Bill Murray for a train, then splitting the rest of the film in thirds with Anderson’s two other core actors. The obvious symbolism and general assumption would be that Brody was being tapped to become Anderson’s new leading man and muse.

It didn’t end up working out that way, which is perhaps for the best. Brody isn’t quite as far out there as Dafoe and Swinton, but occupies a space closer to the margin than the center, down to add color and play broad, funny supporting characters in subsequent efforts. It’s why his profane, jilted gangster brat in Grand Budapest—comfortably insulting Ralph Fiennes as a “candy ass” in Europe in the 1930s—is my favorite performance of his. He’s violent, hilarious, and outrageous, playing against type and having a blast.

Scarlett Johansson

Films: Isle of Dogs, Asteroid City

Best Role: Asteroid City

Notes: Johansson is at her best when offering flat affect, an impossible and unapproachable goddess, drained of emotion. Asteroid City is, essentially, a duet between her and Schwartzman. As Midge Campbell, a Marilyn Monroe type, she’s both cold and alluring, gorgeous and captivating.

Jeffrey Wright

Films: The French Dispatch, Asteroid City

Best Role: The French Dispatch

Notes: He’s the heart and soul of The French Dispatch, an expat Baldwin figure who drives home the power and message of the film, as well as the justifiable love it has for Bill Murray’s editor-patriarch. But his screen time is up against a bunch of players with starring roles.

F. Murray Abraham

Films: The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs

Best Role: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Abraham and Revolori will always be linked in the hearts and minds of Wes heads as the Kate Winslett–Gloria Stuart audience surrogate battery at the heart of his best film, The Grand Budapest Hotel. The performances are halves of a whole, and need to pick each other up for the part, and the film, to work.

Tony Revolori

Films The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City

Best Role: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Notes: See notes for Murray Abraham, above.

Michael Gambon

Films: The Life Aquatic, The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Best Role: The Life Aquatic

Notes: Only two credits, but the great Brit does the two registers of (non-Harry Potter) Gambon schtick that made him legendary: the benevolent money guy in Life Aquatic and the scheming arch-thug in Fox. His accent with that cigar and bacon fat voice oozes authority and makes him a natural Anderson player, but for some reason he never returns.