How Andrea Riseborough's last-minute Oscar campaign for To Leslie cinched her a nomination

Charlize Theron hosted a screening at CAA, followed by screenings hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow, Courteney Cox, Edward Norton, Jennifer Aniston, and Minnie Driver. Fellow actors (mostly women) such as Kate Winslet, Melanie Lynsky, Demi Moore, Jane Fonda, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, and Frances Fisher began to come out of the woodwork to praise Riseborough’s performance as a single mother living in West Texas who squanders her lottery winnings.

“I was just struck by its authenticity. I felt like I was watching a movie from the ’70s, a time when so many of my favorite films were made. Coming Home, Tender Mercies, Badlands. Movies about the human experience. Made without judgment, or commentary, just that magic of watching people behave,” actor Sarah Paulson told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month. “Andrea’s performance affected me profoundly; achingly human and without vanity—and I do not mean ‘vanity’ in terms of appearance, I mean ‘without awareness of how one is perceived or how one will be perceived’—just total embodiment. Immersion. Movies like this, made for little money, that are this powerful and true, should be given the same attention and consideration as those that have huge studios and therefore budgets behind them.”

Ultimately, the campaign worked. Riseborough cinched a nomination, her first like many other nominees this year.

“You always think, ‘If we’ve done a good enough job it will break through the noise,’ but often it’s just impossible to compete with millions of dollars of advertising,” Riseborough says. “Every year, for some reason, there are spotlights shining brighter in some places than in others, and maybe it is just all to do with money, though I try not to be cynical in that way. It has been special to feel so supported by the community—especially by actors—and to feel like the work has broken through that. It’s really not something I’ve ever experienced before.”

Riseborough’s no stranger to giving gripping, well-executed performances, seen in Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor or Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman. She is not a nobody actor without a full body of work. She’s been waiting in the wings for years now, and hopefully, this nomination means we’ll see more center-stage performances from her.