Jeff Goldblum

Films: The Life Aquatic, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, Asteroid City

Best Role: The Life Aquatic

Notes: The quirky king of idiosyncratic line delivery was an obvious fit for Anderson and has been a core player for nearly 20 years. He gets ample space to be “Goldblum” as an obnoxious ex in Life Aquatic, but never really gets the screen time deserving of his talents again. What’s frustrating is the sense of possibility and opportunity. Like we could say about nearly every actor on this list, but particularly the top 10, how incredible would an Anderson vehicle written specifically for Jeff Goldblum be?

Willem Dafoe

Films: Life Aquatic, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City

Best Role: The Life Aquatic

Notes: Dafoe is of a piece in Anderson’s universe, up for anything no matter how bizarre or extreme. Anderson has narrowly interpreted Dafoe’s rather infinitely dynamic talent as menacing, a pit bull henchman thug loyal to his master, be it for “good” (as Klaus in Aquatic) or evil (as Rat in Fox and Jopling in Grand Budapest).

Seymour Cassel (one of these guys, but I don't know which one)

Films: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic
Best Role: The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore

Notes: Cassel and Kumar Pallana (not included) serve largely the same roles in the early Anderson films. They’re the believable support and cuddly hearts of their films, Sancho Panza–types who endear us to the films' protagonists for their loyalty to each other.

Edward Norton

Films: Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City

Best Role: Moonrise Kingdom

Notes: Norton is a kind of demarcating line between movements in Anderson's career. He has quietly become a staple player for Anderson, showing up in every film he’s made since debuting in Moonrise Kingdom. In that film he’s a hapless Boy Scout detective-protector; in Grand Budapest he’s a uniformed jackboot with a semblance of humanity. Anderson most often casts Norton as an authority figure, a perfect subject for Anderson to stuff in uniform and lend authority. He’s a classic Anderson character: the helpless automaton, futilely attempting to impose the illusion of control on havoc.

Tilda Swinton

Films: Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City

Best Role: The French Dispatch

Notes: In Matt Zoller Seitz’s addendum to his Anderson Collection dedicated specifically to Grand Budapest, Wes Anderson sums up Swinton’s performance in both Moonrise and Budapest: “Her character(s)…are meant to be real people, and human characters. But at the same time, you could say they’re something else.” Across five films Swinton is wacky, chameleonic, heavy on makeup, prosthetics, and accents. The best of the bunch is probably the Aspbergery, flighty, New York art world type who serves as a narrator for the Benecio Ddel Toro vignette in French Dispatch.

Bryan Cranston

Films: Isle of Dogs, Asteroid City

Best Role: Isle of Dogs

Notes: There isn’t really a lead in Isle of Dogs, but if you had to pick one, it would probably be Cranston, which is how he leaps ahead of a few actors on this list. His role in Asteroid City is essentially a reprisal of the Balaban role in Moonrise Kingdom, complete with a fourth-wall-breaking episode as the Our Town stage manager, appropriate for a film that borrows much more from Wilder than Moonrise did—but Balaban’s part was meatier.

Liev Schreiber

Films: Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City

Best Role: Isle of Dogs

Notes: Schreiber is basically the second lead in Anderson’s weakest film, Isle of Dogs. But he’s an actual liability in Asteroid City, whose side plot contributes little besides a distraction from the main story of two families struggling with grief and loss.

Mathieu Amalric

Films: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch

Natalie Portman

Films: The Darjeeling Limited, Hotel Chevalier

Léa Seydoux

Films: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch