Benedict Cumberbatch - "Christopher Tietjens", Parade's End
Matt Damon - "Scott Thorson", Behind the Candelabra
Michael Douglas - "Liberace", Behind the Candelabra
Dominic West - "Hector Madden", The Hour
Ben Whishaw - "Freddie Lyon", The Hour
While Sherlock has been a standout in the past few years, this seems to be the year where Benedict Cumberbatch is determined to get as many shades as he's capable of captured for posterity. I'm not familiar with Ford Madox Ford's novels, but Cumberbatch made Tietjens real as a man clinging to notions of civility and propriety in a world seemingly determined to cast them aside, and the character feels both noble and frustratingly weak-willed at turns. The performances of Damon and Douglas form one of those tandem leads where it seems unfair that only one can win. While Damon is playing a character much younger than him, he makes Scott's innocence believable, his hunger for love, both paternal and romantic, palpable, and his eventual hardening into a lonely adulthood tragic. Douglas never shies away from Liberace's capacity for vanity, or the fundamental callousness that lies at the heart of his pursuit of ever-younger paramours. But neither is his performance cynical - he certainly believes in the rapturous potential of love, if not the intractability of soul mates. West plays Hector as a man painfully aware of his weaknesses, especially as he lets down his wife and coworkers in as public a fashion as possible, but always striving to live up to the full potential he knows is there too. His desire to do good always wars with the mercenary attitude he's supposed to affect as a man in his position. Even so, it's Whishaw's performance as Freddie that makes me so disappointed that The Hour won't be returning. The Hour took what The Newsroom expresses through endless speeches on the value of journalistic inquiry and just showed it, embodied in Freddie's determination to follow the season's story even unto his doom.
Honorable Mentions: Toby Jones, The Girl; Rufus Sewell, Restless
I wouldn't be surprised to see: Kenneth Branagh, Wallander: An Event in Autumn; Diego Morgado, The Bible; Al Pacino, Phil Spector
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