As the 98th Academy Awards approach on Sunday, March 15, 2026, anticipation builds around the best supporting actress category, featuring a diverse lineup of performers who have brought depth and intensity to their roles in films tackling personal trauma, horror, spirituality, and revolution. The nominees include Elle Fanning for her poignant turn in Sentimental Value, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas also from that film, Amy Madigan in the chilling Weapons, Wunmi Mosaku in Sinners, and Teyana Taylor in One Battle After Another. Each actress has drawn from personal experiences and cultural insights to craft characters that resonate amid the films' broader narratives of family strife, supernatural terror, ancestral connections, and political upheaval.
Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier and nominated for nine Oscars including best picture and best international feature, centers on a fractured family grappling with loss and artistic ambition. Elle Fanning, 27, portrays Rachel Kemp, a Hollywood actress drawn into a Danish filmmaker's deeply personal project. Fanning, who began her career as a toddler in the 2001 film I Am Sam alongside her sister Dakota, has amassed over 80 roles, including standout performances in The Neon Demon and the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. This marks her first Oscar nod, following an Emmy nomination for The Girl From Plainville.
Fanning described the role to The Hollywood Reporter as evoking a younger version of herself in the industry: "We're at different phases, but there was a little feeling while playing her that maybe I was looking back at a younger version of myself in this world." In a Los Angeles Times podcast interview, she recounted the instinctual pull toward the project: "[My agent] said, 'Joachim Trier has a new film and there's a part for an American actress in a role, even though the film is predominantly in Norwegian. It's going to film in Oslo.' And from that moment, I was like, 'Oh, I have to do this.' I'm a really instinctual person. And I get feelings. I feel like I'm a little psychic."
She emphasized avoiding clichés in Rachel's portrayal, telling the podcast: "I saw the pitfalls that I could have fallen into, the cliches that maybe could happen, that she could become kind of a joke. So when I talked to Joachim, I was happy to know we were on the same page of how we wanted Rachel to be presented." Fanning connected the character's career struggles to her own, noting pressures on women in Hollywood: "People are really quick to – especially women – put us into a box of limitations and tell you what you can or can't do. I feel like I've been really lucky to navigate that." She highlighted her role in The Great as a breakthrough from her Maleficent image, mirroring Rachel's yearning for recognition.
Co-starring in Sentimental Value is Norwegian actress Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Agnes, the younger sister to Renate Reinsve's Nora, both scarred by family trauma. Lilleaas, from an acting family that ran a theater company, balanced her career with jobs as a dental hygienist, drama teacher, and elderly caregiver. She told USA Today: "In the nursing home, you're working with people who have lived long, long lives, and for a lot of them, those lives are slipping and they can't remember. So, you're a detective, in a way, trying to figure out who these people are. That's what you do as an actor – you're looking for what's underneath."
This is Lilleaas's first Oscar nomination, after winning best supporting actress from the National Board of Review. At the New York Film Festival premiere last fall, she discussed the script's novel-like depth in a Q&A: "This whole sisterhood, working with the theme of sisterhood, is really interesting, that they lived the same life, but of course like all siblings it's completely different." She portrayed Agnes as secure due to her sister's protection: "I think for Agnes she's able to be a safer and more secure person because she had a protector growing up, which is really beautiful, and so she could be her sister's protecter in adulthood because of that."
Lilleaas noted Agnes's deliberate choice of a conventional life amid judgment: "Her father and sister judge her a little, because it's more conventional, her life. But it's a very active choice that she makes. She wants love, she wants security and safety, and she wants a family, and she made that for herself." The character receives love differently than Nora, despite shared trauma with their father, Gustav, played by Stellan Skarsgård, who is also nominated for best supporting actor.
Shifting to horror, Amy Madigan's portrayal of Aunt Gladys in Zach Cregger's Weapons has captivated and terrified audiences. The film unfolds in a town plunged into chaos by the disappearance of elementary school children, with Gladys emerging as a monstrous figure wielding witchcraft against her nephew Alex. Madigan, a former rocker-performance artist who studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute, met her husband Ed Harris on stage. Her extensive credits include Oscar-nominated work in Twice in a Lifetime, films like Places in the Heart and Field of Dreams, and a Golden Globe for Roe v. Wade.
Director Cregger stressed the role's importance to The Hollywood Reporter: "If that character doesn't work, this movie doesn't work." Madigan embraced the risk, telling Entertainment Weekly: "Risky is kind of a really fun thing to participate in. I could create Gladys, and she's a big personality, and it seemed to work for this, so that was very freeing." She collaborated with hair, makeup, and effects teams for dual looks—a clownish public facade with an orange wig and smeared makeup, and a decrepit witchy form. During tests, she said, "Zach was in sheer delight. 'cause that's what he was hoping for."
Gladys's image exploded online, becoming a TikTok meme and Halloween staple. Madigan reflected to The Guardian: "People like Gladys. They want to hang out with Gladys. Which I find kind of interesting. It's crazy how people are responding to Gladys. But I have to accept that they're also responding to me." She viewed children's nightmares as a compliment, and her performance earned her the Screen Actors Guild's Actor Award.
In Ryan Coogler's Sinners, nominated for 16 Oscars including best picture, Wunmi Mosaku plays Annie, a hoodoo practitioner in the Deep South. Born in Nigeria to academic parents who moved to England, Mosaku trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Her accolades include a BAFTA for Damilola, Our Loved Boy and a British Independent Film Award for His House. This is her first Oscar nomination, following a second BAFTA for Sinners.
Mosaku shared with CBS Mornings her initial unfamiliarity and biases: "There's a distinction between voodoo and hoodoo, and so we had a hoodoo consultant [Yvonne Chireau]. I didn't know anything about the culture, the spirituality, the connection to the Yoruba, the traditional religion of ifa – I didn't know any of it. So, I went in completely clueless, complete blank slate. Except, actually, I did have a judgment, 'cause I was born and raised in a really strict Christian household and so I did have a judgment of ifa and voodoo and knowing it was all kind of connected to hoodoo. So I thought it was scary, and my mom was like, 'Be careful, please be careful.'"
The role transformed her perspective: "I feel like more connected to my ancestry because of it and more connected to my purpose because of it. I think it's such a beautiful reminder that we're all going to be future ancestors and, like, what we're going to do with that our gifts and our energy into this world and how it will reverberate," she said.
Mosaku addressed cultural assimilation's toll in The Guardian: "As a youngster in England, she was discouraged from becoming fluent in her native language, Yoruba, because it would result in a 'funny' accent. That's the stuff that's really important. You don't appreciate the cost to people, the tax on a person's spirit in order to assimilate into your country – and for what? It's superiority. It's ego. It's brutal. It's a cultural genocide."
Teyana Taylor rounds out the nominees in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, a 13-Oscar nominee including best picture, adapting Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel into a tale of revolutionaries assaulting a detention center for undocumented immigrants. Taylor plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, a fierce member of the French 75 group, whose zeal persists post-childbirth with Leonardo DiCaprio's character. A Grammy-nominated singer with gold albums like K.T.S.E. and The Album, Taylor also choreographs and directs, with acting credits in Coming 2 America.
She learned of the role amid L.A. traffic and described Perfidia on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: "I think Perfidia is very complex. Perfidia has a lot of layers, and I think a lot of her layers are color-coordinated. That's what I chose to do with her character. I wanted to color coordinate her layers! This is a woman who was unapologetically herself. Of course, selfish at times, but for whatever good reason she feels like that is, she's also coming from the pressures of coming from a long line of revolutionaries."
In a SAG-AFTRA Foundation talk, Taylor detailed an emotional letter scene revealing Perfidia's 16 years away from her daughter: "The original ending was me in Cuba, or Mexico. I was somewhere and we originally had that in there. Then he wound up taking it out and was like, 'Let's just do a letter.' And I remember it was just me, [Paul], and our sound guy... It was actually the last day of filming, I think. And we did it in one take... Those were real tears. It was real emotion." The scene, filmed amid producer Adam Somner's cancer battle, moved the crew: "I was crying. Paul was crying. Our sound guy was crying holding up the boom mic." Taylor won a Golden Globe for the role and values the letter's impact: "You hear her heart in this letter... These are questions that I ask my children... Do you feel safe? Do you feel loved? What do you want to be?"
These nominations highlight the Academy's embrace of international stories and genre-bending narratives, from Sentimental Value's Oslo-filmed introspection to Sinners' Southern mysticism. As voting concludes, the ceremony at the Dolby Theatre promises to celebrate performances that blend vulnerability with power, potentially elevating careers like Lilleaas's debut nod or affirming veterans like Madigan. Industry watchers predict a tight race, with Sinners' 16 nods giving it frontrunner status, though One Battle After Another's topical edge and Taylor's raw emotion could sway voters toward fresh voices in revolutionary tales.