"Until I was about 17, I didn't quite realise what a major part of my psyche and my soul the American films I was raised on were," says Andrew Garfield. "Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, The Princess Bride – those are the films that led me to want to be an actor." Now he has his chance to stake his own claim on the psyches and souls of a new generation of teenage moviegoers ... read more Photograph: Carlo Allegri/AP/Press Association Images
She didn't win the Oscar for An Education last year. But no matter: she had arrived. Her appeal is easy to fathom. She’s bubbly but demure, physically unthreatening and yet possessed of an impressive emotional strength. Watch her in a thankless role as the principled daughter of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, in which she feels forcefully human. Or see her as the naive, tentative Kathy in Never Let Me Go, in which she manages not to be out-dazzled by two other bright lights of British cinema, Knightley and Andrew Garfield. Mulligan missed out on the big American role that was widely considered to be hers for the taking – the lead in David Fincher’s US remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – but that could hardly count as a knockback when there are collaborations in the offing with Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, in which she plays a single mother wooed by Ryan Gosling) and Sam Mendes (a film of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach) Photograph: Startraks Photo / Rex Features/Startraks Photo / Rex Features
Soon she stars in Never Let Me Go with Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan. She recently finished filming as Wallis Simpson in WE, an abdication crisis drama directed by Madonna. But it is Brighton Rock that has put her name on everyone’s lips. She plays steely little mouse Rose to Sam Riley’s Pinkie. At the Toronto film festival, guardian.co.uk/film’s David Cox said: “To say her achievement deserves an Oscar would be somehow to demean it.” Riseborough herself is bracingly forthright. She brushes aside any attempt to attach rhyme or reason to her career choices. Instead she comes out with a lovely musing on cinema: “Films can do so many brilliant things to you. They can pick you up from the floor, they can elate you, and pull you right back to the floor sometimes.” For TV, she even managed to convincingly portray Margaret Thatcher as a racy 23-year-old who gets a kick out of being offered a lift by a bloke in a fast Jag. Photograph: Arthur Mola/Getty Images
This a woman who dragged her camera up Mount Everest (including a broken ankle, giardiasis, head lice, altitude sickness, amoebic dysentery and a transport system reliant on “the backs of yaks in snowstorms”) to safeguard the authenticity of her 2006 film Blindsight, a documentary tracking a group of blind Tibetan teenagers on their mission to conquer the rooftop of the world. Her latest work, Countdown to Zero, a harrowing investigation into the present nuclear threat, saw her tracking down Russian gangsters who cite al-Qaida as the preferred customers for their enriched uranium, as well as the former president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, whom she slipped in to visit at his UK safehouse. Wasteland – a study of the transformative magic of recyclable art, which puts at its heart the lives of poor rubbish-pickers in Brazil – picked up rave reviews at Sundance. Both films are likely contenders for Oscar nominations.
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His next starring role will be in the equally antsy rapper-actor-director Ben “Plan B” Drew’s debut movie, Ill Manors, a gritty tale set in east London. He took a role in Michael Winterbottom’s incendiary The Road to Guantánamo while putting the finishing touches on his first single, the satirical Post 9/11 Blues. Winterbottom, he says, “showed me it’s all about breaking the rules”. Then came his gripping performance as a drug dealer in Eran Creevy’s Shifty, a role that saw him nominated for best actor at 2008’s British Independent Film awards. Chris Morris then put Ahmed’s natural chutzpah and edgy charisma to good use when he cast him as Omar, the head of a gang of wannabe jihadists in his controversial debut, Four Lions. Photograph: AXEL SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images
Gareth Edwards is the ultimate Hollywood nightmare. Just as the studios are conspiring to convince us 3D is the future and only the megabuck boys can compete, Edwards is making waves with a debut feature he wrote, shot, directed and created all the special effects for – on a budget that wouldn’t cover a studio executive’s monthly pool-cleaning bill. Edwards’s Monsters, a smart and surprisingly romantic alien-invasion tale, isn’t out until December, but it’s already been championed by horror fans who caught its premiere at the SXSW festival in Texas in March, with some zealous supporters hailing Edwards as the next James Cameron. “I embraced this new thing called computer animation in the hope that, if Hollywood never called, I could still learn how to make a film on my own,” says Edwards, who describes Monsters as a cross between Lost in Translation and War of the Worlds. Photograph: Matt Carr/Getty Images
Mat Whitecross’s biopic of Ian Dury, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, looked nothing like a first feature. For a start, the cast was best of British: Andy Serkis as Dury, Olivia Williams, Ray Winstone, Toby Jones. A good few of them popped in for a day or two, appearing in tiny roles – as they might do for an old hand as a favour. Whitecross credits the goodwill to Dury: “So many people love him.” Strictly speaking, Sex & Drugs was not Whitecross’s first film. In 2006, he co-directed The Road to Guantánamo with Michael Winterbottom. Just four years earlier, not long out of college, he had got a job as Winterbottom’s assistant. Whitecross knows people must have assumed he was a glorified assistant, doing the interviews while Winterbottom got on with the tricky stuff: “It was a weird one, but it was 50-50, which was down to Michael being incredibly open and ridiculously generous. Photograph: Henry S. Dziekan III/WireImage
The 21-year-old said recently that she has no time for “cigarette in hand, tortured soul” actors. No, indeed. When she took three months off school during sixth form to shoot her big-screen breakthrough, 28 Weeks Later, it didn’t stop her getting three As in her A-levels. In Solitary Man, she is a New York teenager seduced by her mum’s boyfriend, played by Michael Douglas. On TV she has starred in top-drawer drama: Miss Austen Regrets two years ago, and alongside Matt Smith in the upcoming chronicle of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin years, Christopher and His Kind. Her new films include the cyber-thriller Chatroom, with Aaron Johnson. After that comes Jane Eyre. Needless to say, Hollywood has come a-knocking. In the meantime, she is filming a Fright Night remake with David Tennant and Colin Farrell, and she recently graced the pages of Vanity Fair magazine, with a gaggle of what the headline called “British belles”. Photograph: Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images
When his film Submarine unspooled in front of an audience at the Toronto film festival, Richard Ayoade compared the experience to a very long heart attack. You would have thought having Ben Stiller, the film’s executive producer, introducing him as “upsettingly talented” might have eased the pressure. Not a bit. When Ayoade joined Stiller on stage he adjusted his glasses three times, and launched into a self-deprecating, though terrifically entertaining, preamble-cum-stand-up routine. He was, he told the audience, in an “egotistical maelstrom of self-doubt”, his voice not so far off Moss, the super-nerd he played in The IT Crowd – computing’s answer to Beaker from The Muppets. Until now, Ayoade has been best known for having a hand in some fine British comedy. He was the president of Footlights at Cambridge. In 2001, he won the Perrier with Matthew Holness for their spoof horror, Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead, which they took to TV. Photograph: Michael Tran/FilmMagic
Right now Sam Riley is in Mexico, slogging through Walter Salles’s adaptation of On the Road. Since his debut in Control as Joy Division's Ian Curtis, Riley has kept a lowish profile. He didn't rush out to Hollywood; by all accounts, he just isn't interested in that kind of career. Instead, Riley keeps himself to himself, living in Berlin with his wife, the actor Alexandra Maria Lara (they met on the set of Control). Riley was 26 and mostly unknown when director Anton Corbijn cast him as Curtis. Corbijn had photographed Joy Division in the 1970s, and said afterward that Riley reminded him of the "underdressed and underfed" skint kids he’d shot. For a while, he was in a band signed to Polydor. But when his agent announced that he'd heard of a Joy Division film in the offing, Riley was working in a warehouse in Leeds folding shirts. Next up: Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock and 13, Gela Babluani's remake of his own French thriller.
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