This year’s Emmy Awards race isn’t for the faint of heart. The contenders won’t be announced until the morning of July 15, but now that the voting period has officially closed, predictions are heating up. One category that not enough pundits are talking about enough is Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or a Movie.
This might not be the most competitive category, but the current front-runners include some of the industry’s most established figures — some familiar with leading a project, some whose spotlight is long overdue — and a handful of breakout star turns. Out of the many performers worthy of recognition, here are seven standouts who deserve to have their names read aloud on July 15.
7
Rashida Jones
As Amanda Waters in ‘Black Mirror’ (2011–)
Black Mirror‘s seventh season opens with a shot across the bow through “Common People,” an emotionally damaging episode co-written by Bisha K. Ali and the series’ creator, Charlie Brooker, and directed by Ally Pankiw. Amanda Waters (Rashida Jones), a teacher and happily married wife, falls ill with a sudden-onset brain tumor that doctors declare inoperable. Enter Rivermind Technologies, a neuroscience company, who offer Amanda and her husband, Mike (Chris O’Dowd), a revolutionary life-saving operation, as long as the Waters pay for Riverbend’s monthly subscription service. The couple’s joyful relief fades once Riverbend’s tiered subscriptions increase, their finances grow tighter, and Amanda slowly becomes a walking, talking ad read.
Season 7 premiered earlier this year, and “Common People” is already considered one of the anthology series’ most pessimistic and somber episodes. Even though Black Mirror runs on anti-capitalist concepts that are too chillingly close to reality, this episode’s bleak exploitation of the working class — aka, the “common people” — wouldn’t have as much impact without the performances at its beating heart. Jones is gut-wrenching, conveying the shift from a kind woman who enjoys her work, loves her husband, and continues pushing through her fertility complications, to receiving the bone-chilling pronouncement of her imminent death, to relishing her miracle second chance, and, finally, a fate worse than death.
6
Kaitlyn Dever
As Belle Gibson in ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ (2025)
Between Booksmart, Unbelievable, and Dopesick, Kaitlyn Dever has been making waves in the industry for a while. Recently shouted-out by fellow Justified alum Walton Goggins as “one of the best” performers of her generation, her acclaim has only increased with her crucial role as Abby Anderson in The Last of Us Season 2 and Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar, the latter created by Samantha Strauss and based on snake oil saleswoman Belle Gibson’s (Dever) fall from grace. Gibson, a former social media influencer and admitted scammer, built her health and wellness empire by pretending to have numerous kinds of cancer. Fame and fortune followed, with Gibson reaping the rewards of her lie and promoting holistic habits, alternative medicine, and controversial pseudoscience as “cures” for cancer.
Apple Cider Vinegar covers the breadth of Gibson’s deception, and Dever makes the most of the chance to flex her star-making muscles. Gibson, as rendered by Dever, is a despicable narcissist you can’t tear your eyes away from, lest you miss Dever’s next micro-expression. Belle’s vulnerable in her insecure need to be liked yet repulsive in her manipulative pursuit of it, and shameless about exploiting other people’s health for her own gain. It’s not easy to inhabit a well-known (technically, well-disliked) public figure without pursuing caricature, nor to make Gibson’s manufactured charisma authentic enough for empathetic people to believe hook line and sinker, while acknowledging the see-through nature of her facade.
5
Amanda Seyfried
As Mickey Fitzpatrick in ‘Long Bright River’ (2025)
Mickey Fitzpatrick (Amanda Seyfried), a patrol officer born and raised in Philadelphia, tries to support the vulnerable communities the rest of her profession overlooks: unhoused individuals, sex workers, and those with drug addictions. Substance abuse runs in her family, having contributed to her mother’s death and Mickey’s estranged relationship with her younger sister, Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings). When Kacey’s extended disappearance coincides with a serial killer targeting sex workers, Mickey unravels the clues, grapples with the ways her good intentions clash with the systemic corruption surrounding her, and slowly starts processing her generational trauma.
Seyfried won in this category when she transformed herself into notorious billionaire Elizabeth Holmes for 2022’s The Dropout. Comparatively, Mickey of Long Bright River, based on the bestselling novel by Liz Moore, is a complex and sympathetic heroine. She’s reserved, only really open with her beloved patrol partner and her son, and we feel every agonizing inch of Mickey’s loneliness. It’s in the way she holds herself, guarded against a world that only knows how to inflict hurt, and how her trained gaze both scans for threats and avoids eye contact. It’s a quieter performance layered with soulful, melancholy, and acute detail.
4
Lola Petticrew
As Dolours Price in ‘Say Nothing’ (2024)
Political unrest and lethal violence characterized The Troubles, a decades-spanning conflict based in Northern Ireland. The IRA, a paramilitary group seeking Irish independence from the United Kingdom at any cost and denounced as illegal by the Irish government, emerged as the period’s most infamous organization. Showrunner Joshua Zetumer‘s historical drama Say Nothing adapts Patrick Radden Keefe‘s investigative non-fiction book, the 2018 bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. The real-life sisters Dolours (Lola Petticrew) and Marian Price (Hazel Doupe) actively engaged in the IRA’s actions, and the Price siblings’ dual perspectives serve as Say Nothing‘s relentlessly complex moral backbone.
Although Dolours barely counts as a 20-something, her straightforward demeanor and righteous determination make her seem much older — hardened, steely, and bursting with cultural pride. Love, violence, and nationalism go hand-in-hand for Dolours, a young woman as ferocious as a ticking time bomb capable of choosing when she detonates. Her almost fanatical devotion to protecting and advancing her home remains steadfast, until the horrifying collateral damage catches up to her and shakes her beliefs to the core. Petticrew’s subtle and riveting performance won them Actress in a Lead Role at the 2025 IFTA Film & Drama Awards.
Say Nothing
- Release Date
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2024 – 2023
- Network
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Hulu
- Directors
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Anthony Byrne, Mary Nighy
- Writers
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Joe Murtagh
3
Cate Blanchett
As Catherine Ravenscroft in ‘Disclaimer’ (2024)
Apple TV+ brought out the metaphorical big guns behind the camera and in front of it for Disclaimer, inspired by author Renée Knight‘s 2015 novel of the same name. Alfonso Cuarón, writer and director of all seven episodes, evokes unsettling edge-of-your-seat psychological thrills and shows a magician’s slight-of-hand as Disclaimer guides viewers through versions of acclaimed journalist Catherine Ravenscroft’s (Cate Blanchett) past. One of those interpretations, specifically about tragic events from two decades prior, takes shape through The Perfect Stranger, a fiction book published by someone seeking elaborate revenge against Catherine — who lives in ever-increasing paranoid terror about what secrets its pages might expose.
For Catherine, a woman whose personal life and career accomplishments are both defined by fact and fiction, truth and lies, Disclaimer needs someone of Blanchett’s capabilities. One of our most versatile actresses infuses Catherine’s reactions with gravitas and meaning while leaving enough room for viewers to read their own presumptions into her responses. As The Perfect Stranger brutally re-opens Catherine’s old scars for public consumption, she demonstrates a haunted quality befitting a woman hunted by the past in more ways than one. Blanchett reveals her character’s dimensions over time, holding Catherine’s contradictions in check. She’s utterly human in all her flaws and fears and hypnotic to watch.
2
Michelle Williams
As Molly Kochan in ‘Dying for Sex’ (2025)
Sex and death have always been linked, for obvious reasons. For Molly Kochan (Michelle Williams), her journey toward sexual liberation occurs after being diagnosed with stage IV cancer. Wanting to have as few regrets as possible before she passes, Molly aims to fix the fact she’s never experienced an orgasm with another person. To that end, she divorces her husband and embarks on hundreds of hook-ups with various partners in various erotic scenarios, supported entirely by her best friend, Nikki Boyer (Jenny Slate).
Inspired by the true stories Molly documented in her and Nikki’s podcast of the same name, Dying for Sex offers Williams, a consistently formidable performer, the spotlight her skills deserve. Playing a terminally ill character who chooses to live the rest of their time with joie de vivre has become awards-baiting material. Williams never pursues the low-hanging fruit. Her gratifyingly authentic performance navigates horror, heartbreak, rage, defiance, delight, and self-actualization. Molly connects with her body for the first time precisely because it’s going to grow irrevocably frailer — and for Molly’s lifelong trauma, discovery brings healing. Williams conveys this through a woman’s distinct perspective and respects the real individual who documented these experiences. As such, Molly leaps off the screen with humor and heart: assertive and awkward and afraid, fumbling and feeling, and vibrantly alive.
1
Cristin Milioti
As Sofia Gigante in ‘The Penguin’ (2024)
Cristin Milioti has gone on record about her lifelong love for the Batman franchise and her fervent dream of participating in any Gotham-adjacent project. Every audition of hers fell through – until the perfect role arrived at the perfect time. The Penguin might be titled, well, The Penguin, but Milioti’s Sofia Gigante shares co-lead duty with Colin Farrell‘s Oswald Cobb, and both character and performer are every inch his equal — two forces of nature driven by seething rage.
Sofia steals every scene with enthralling aplomb, lying in wait like a coiled viper with her calculating, cerebral stillness. A full world and history exists in her eyes: a sheltered, traumatized victim broken by betrayal evolves into a hardened survivor and merciless aggressor who’s on the precipice of seizing long-awaited, iron-willed control over her livelihood for herself, on her terms. While no less vicious than Oz, Sofia’s more empathetic backstory and trajectory are by design; “good for her,” we say, lifting our glasses in salute as she exacts her revenge. Milioti is nothing short of a revelation in what should prove to be her career-defining role. Hand over that Emmy.
