Cannes 2025: Who could win the award for Best Actor?

Our top picks for the award for Best Actor

As the eagerly-awaited decision of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival jury, chaired by Juliette Binoche this year, is set to be revealed on Saturday, May 24th, the race for the prestigious award for Best Actor is getting more intense. This year’s edition has been full of emotions, striking performances and several acclaimed actors have risen to the forefront.

In 2024, Jesse Plemons was the award recipient for Kinds of Kindness directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. This year, the spotlight shines on a very different, yet equally remarkable, group of contenders. From Wagner Moura’s restrained power to Joaquin Phoenix’s legendary intensity, Guillaume Marbeck’s breakout performance and Benicio Del Toro’s ever-sharp virtuosity, the competition for the 2025 award for Best Actor promises to be fiercely coveted.

Here are our favorite actors who just might step onto the stage of the Grand Théâtre Lumière to receive the coveted award for Best Actor at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

Wagner Moura, the quiet force in The Secret Agent

In The Secret Agent, one of the most beautiful films in the competition, the Bahia-born Brazilian actor, known for his role as Pablo Escobar in Narcos, embodies a former researcher attempting to rebuild his life under military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1970s. The hero of this historical and political thriller, which is also a sensual, modern portrait of individuals crushed by unfair power, Moura brings gravitas and emotional depth. No one would be surprised if Juliette Binoche’s jury calls his name.

Joaquin Phoenix as the embodiment of chaos in Eddington

Already an Oscar and two-time Golden Globe winner, Joaquin Phoenix also won the award for Best Actor with You Were Never Really Here directed by Lynne Ramsay back in 2017. He could win it again this year. His intense performance in Ari Aster’s Eddington, a neo-Western film set during the Covid pandemic, suggests as much. Portraying an asthmatic sheriff in a small town in New Mexico who adds chaos to an already chaotic world, Phoenix channels a fractured, near-apocalyptic America. Chaos is his domain, although he sometimes overdoes it.

Guillaume Marbeck, the French revelation starring in Nouvelle Vague

He is the revelation of Cannes. Still unknown before his arrival in Cannes, French actor Guillaume Marbeck dazzled everyone with his playful, brazenly arrogant portrayal of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. In Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, which charmingly recounts the making of Breathless in 1959, Marbeck proves he can do it all – even do a headstand. Will he walk onto the stage of the Grand Théâtre Lumière stage like that on Saturday, May 24th?

The flamboyant Benicio Del Toro in The Phoenician Scheme

From screenings to parties, one can often spot Benicio Del Toro in Cannes, since the actor won an award for his role as Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh’s film Che. In Wes Anderson’s new feature The Phoenician Scheme, the star of Sicario embodies a businessman with a flamboyant name, Zsa-zsa Korda. Chased by a mob of assassins, he embarks on a journey with his daughter to save himself and to reconnect with the latter. Benicio Del Toro excels, as always, oscillating between elegance and excess, irony and sincerity.

Paul Mescal, the forsaken lover in The History of Sound

Since Aftersun by Charlotte Wells and All of Us Strangers by Andrew Haigh, Paul Mescal has become synonymous with roles portraying fragile characters that are slightly out of sync with the world. South African director Oliver Hermanus offers him another chance to channel melancholy in the gay melodrama The History of Sound. Here, the Irish actor known for his performance in the series Normal People plays a gifted singer, who falls for a fellow music lover played by Josh O’Connor in the 1910s. Their love is impossible, unimaginable. What follows is a tale of disappearances, longing, and regret – the perfect canvas for Paul Mescal’s portrayal of this lovelorn character. Although the film is a bit too stiff to be able to deeply move us, it’s still hard to look away as he showcases heartbreak so well.

Stellan Skarsgård as an unworthy father in Sentimental Value

 

In 2021, actress Renate Reinsve won the award for Best Actress for The Worst Person in the World by Joachim Trier. She is back in the Danish director’s latest film, but her co-star, veteran Stellan Skarsgård (Dune, Andor), is probably the one to receive the prize. In this family drama inspired by Chekhov and Bergman, the Swedish actor embodies a filmmaker trying to make his comeback and make amends for past mistakes. Skarsgård strikes us as a flawed, self-centered man yearning for change and emerges as the competition’s late-breaking surprise.