Vulture’s 100 Most Valuable Stars of 2013

For years, Leonardo DiCaprio was out to prove himself as more than just a teen heartthrob. He was a serious man. An actor. The plan worked, as DiCaprio became a favorite of A-list auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and Steven Spielberg, and their collaborations scored dozens of Oscar nominations (and a Best Picture win for The Departed) and a lot of money (Inception earned $825.5 million total worldwide, while The Great Gatsby pulled in $348.8 million around the globe). There was just one thing missing: a smile.

The formerly impish star hit a brick wall with the dour, roundly ignored J. Edgar, and it seemed to spur him to once again show off his more lighthearted side. As Django Unchained's Calvin Candie, he was both giddily wicked and brutally cruel, and he mounted a full-on, I'm-a-movie-star-dammit charm offensive in Gatsby. Both films scored at the box office, and early glimpses of his next movie, Martin Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street, were highly GIF-able, suggesting DiCaprio at his most hedonistic and appealing. His studio value is second only to Brad Pitt's, because while DiCaprio is still popcorn-blockbuster-averse, he's the best way to get audiences into Hollywood's most expensive adult fare. That's why in our rankings he lands in second place: He doesn't have anything lined up past Wall Street, but can do whatever he wants next

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Which actress was blessed with the highest studio score on this list? It wasn't Jennifer Lawrence, Sandra Bullock, or Angelina Jolie whom our studio executives gave their highest marks to; instead, it was 64-year-old Meryl Streep. And can you blame them? Simply put, Streep is the closest thing to a guarantee you can get in this business: If she's the star of a movie, it's smart, important, and bound to be a quality production. (Or it's Mamma Mia ... but hey, that was a mammoth hit, at least!) But though Streep is often referred to as the world's greatest actress, she cleverly plays against her reputation with charming acceptance speeches in which she fumbles for her glasses and drops self-deprecating bons mots. It's no wonder that her likability score is the same as Most Valuable Stars king Robert Downey Jr.

And she'll need every ounce of that likability for her next role as Violet Weston, the cruel and cancerous matriarch at the center of August: Osage County. The family drama, adapted from the Pulitzer-winning play by Tracy Letts, has Streep tearing into Julia Roberts and her kin with a ferocious meanness; Streep also tears into the scenery, delivering a performance so big that some critics were moved to pan it at the film's Toronto Film Festival debut. But even so, those same pundits took it as fact that Streep would earn an Oscar nod for the role, so beloved is she by the Academy. And Streep is pretty fun even when she's being bad, a quality she'll continue to mine as the Witch in the currently filming Into the Woods, where she'll get to sing onscreen for the first time since Mamma Mia.

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Given the subsequent careers of megafranchise leads Mark Hamill and Elijah Wood, you could be forgiven for assuming that Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe would never be heard from after the most successful film series in history wrapped up in 2011. But the 24-year-old actor has spent the last couple of years making careful, considered choices that could pay off for him in the near future. After initially focusing on Broadway and TV roles, Radcliffe's taken tentative steps back into movie stardom, and his one post-Potter outing, The Woman in Black, proved to be a solid sleeper hit.

Radcliffe is popular enough with the tabloids to have remained highly visible since Potter wrapped, and he's wonderfully charming and likable in his public appearances. Next up, he'll begin to assert himself as a real actor in a series of well-received indie films - Kill Your Darlings, Horns and particularly the rom-com The F Word - that are just starting to roll out in theaters. The studios remain a touch wary of his star value away from Potter, but a return to tentpoles next year with Fox's Frankenstein could help to boost their confidence.

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George Clooney is to Hollywood as Uncle Sam is to America. "We want you" is Clooney's unspoken cry to filmmakers, actors, writers, and backers with deep pockets, a soldier for the artistic possibilities of working inside the studio system. He's an old-school mind with a contemporary sheen. And he gets away with it because he's so damn charming. He's witty and dapper while also seeming like the best friend a middle-aged guy could ever have: He's the generation X male's Jennifer Lawrence, except you want to share a beer, not brunch.

That doesn't make Clooney a tentpole powerhouse at the box office, but that's also because those aren't the kinds of movies he usually makes. Outside of the Ocean's franchise, he hasn't had a $100 million hit since 2000's The Perfect Storm. (Though that drought is now finally ending with Gravity.) Clooney is much more interested in modest-budgeted vehicles for grown-ups, a niche today that only he and a few choice others are allowed to play in. And he can deliver returns: 2008's Burn After Reading, 2009's Up in the Air, and 2011's The Descendants made $60.3, $83.8, and $82.5 million respectively, and they replicated those totals overseas. He has one of the highest studio values for this reason: It's hard for an exec to rationalize making a mid-range, serious movie in today's blockbuster-centric mind-set, but Clooney can earn a studio green light without breaking a sweat; basically, he makes them look good. (Even when he's just behind the scenes as a producer: You're welcome for Best Picture winner Argo, Warner Bros.!) This winter will see his next directorial and starring effort, The Monuments Men, with fellow lovable activist and good-movie hero Matt Damon; that'll be followed by Brad Bird's mysterious Tomorrowland. And then a beer? Please?

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Daniel Day-Lewis is often referred to as our greatest living actor, and this year he helped bolster that case when he became the first person in the history of the Academy Awards to win three Best Actor trophies. That, plus a worldwide box-office total for Lincoln approaching $300 million, help to explain how Day-Lewis scored some of the highest numbers from our panel of studio executives, despite the fact that the 56-year-old actor is perhaps the pickiest around (he accepts roles about as often as Bruce Willis turns down a paycheck).

There have been misfires, certainly: The musical Nine did few of its creatives any favors, least of all a curiously muted Day-Lewis. Though general audiences had never quite warmed to the actor, his likability score jumped a little this year, perhaps because of his role as the Great Anticipator and a series of charming, self-deprecating appearances on the awards circuit. But when Day-Lewis does take a role, it can't help but feel like an event, especially when he's paired with a top-tier director like Paul Thomas Anderson or Steven Spielberg. And he could be back onscreen sooner rather than later: A possible reteam with Spielberg on the PTSD drama Thank You for Your Service is in development.

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People on the Internet claim to loathe Anne Hathaway, but do they speak for everyone? The "Hatha-hate" may be getting under her skin; days after Hathaway picked up the 2013 Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in Les Misérables and delivered a teary-eyed acceptance speech (one that was quickly negatively compared to Jennifer Lawrence's), she told the Daily Mail, "It does get to me. But you have to remember in life that there's a positive to every negative and a negative to every positive." The positive here could be her likability score of 66, just ten percentage points less than Lawrence's: E-Score is a national poll, and her relatively positive numbers are a reminder that the Internet is loud, but it hardly speaks for all moviegoers. As such, studios rate her a 7.25, recognizing that to many, her talent speaks louder than any blogged words.

Just look at what Hathaway accomplished in 2012: Even Les Miz doubters had to grudgingly applaud her turn as Fantine, and fanboys approved her Catwoman in the year's biggest hit, The Dark Knight Rises. ("Fanboys approved" is no faint praise.) Christopher Nolan is sticking with Hathaway, casting her in his Matthew McConaughey-led space epic Interstellar, and she'll delve back into the romantic drama genre for Song One, which she also produced (and will reportedly sing in). Haters gonna hate, but they don't seem to be damaging her career any.

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Elegance, glamour, and raw talent still have a place in Hollywood, as evidenced by the sterling career of Cate Blanchett. With five acting Oscar nominations and one win (a Supporting Actress trophy for Martin Scorsese's The Aviator), Blanchett is conducting her business with Meryl Streep-style discipline. The best directors want to work with her (so far, she's collaborated with Scorsese, Peter Jackson, Todd Haynes, David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, and Steven Spielberg), and she always delivers a performance everyone is talking about at the end of the year. She barely makes a blip on Twitter and the tabloids, but she doesn't need them to keep her career racing forward. Instead, Blanchett simply shows up in a movie and dazzles: Her role in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine is already touted as 2013's Best Actress front-runner.

Unlike Naomi Watts, another actress who gravitates toward serious material with impressive imprimaturs, Blanchett avoids seeming too precious and impenetrable because she also likes to have fun, whether it's with her one-mustache-short-of-a-mustache-twirler villain in the last Indiana Jones movie, or her upcoming dive into the George Clooney boys'-club WWII art heist piece Monuments Men. From there, she'll bounce back and forth between moods: a no doubt ethereal piece from Terrence Malick (Knight of Cups); two more Hobbit films; the HBO adaptation of the memoir Cancer Vixen; a reteam with Todd Haynes for the fifties period piece Carol; a David Mamet thriller, Blackbird; and then a new version of Cinderella, in which she'll play the wicked stepmother. (One can only assume that this will be the kind of delightfully hammy portrayal that would make Angelina Jolie's Maleficent back away slowly.) Oh, and somewhere in all that, she'll make her directing debut adapting the dark international best seller The Dinner. The only way she'll ever be idle is if she chooses to, because everyone wants a piece of the great Cate.

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2013 marks 50 years since Clint Eastwood broke through as a movie star with A Fistful of Dollars, but the last twelve months or so haven't been the star's finest. His planned remake of A Star Is Born seemed to fall apart after Beyoncé dropped out. His first onscreen role in four years, Trouble With the Curve, proved a damp box-office squib, taking only $45 million worldwide, with audiences seemingly less willing to see him in a sports-flavored weepie than as a cantankerous ass-kicker. His separation from second wife Dina Ruiz has found him in the tabloids for the first time in decades. And don't even get us started on his chair stunt at last year's Republican Convention ...

But none of these troubles change the fact that the 83-year-old Eastwood is a full-blown movie legend, with fans spanning generations (he's mentioned more on Twitter than you might imagine). He's still an active director who moved on from A Star Is Born to another musical, Jersey Boys, though he's a reluctant actor who was lured to Curve by his longtime assistant director, Robert Lorenz, who'd picked that film as his directorial debut. While Curve disappointed at the box office, Eastwood's studio value (8.25) remains very high, and if he wants to come back to acting, longtime home Warner Bros. would be happy to have him, especially if he picks a project in his Gran Torino wheelhouse. Calling out punks knows no age limits.

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That thing where you're a famous, beautiful, critically acclaimed young actress who wins an Oscar the same year you've got a giant franchise blockbuster coming out? Yeah, Jennifer Lawrence just pulled all that off, but Natalie Portman did it first. Admittedly, Portman's been on pause since her giant 2011, where she took home an Academy Award for Black Swan and scored her biggest box-office bounty since the Star Wars prequels with Thor, but you can't blame the 32-year-old for taking some time off to raise her first child. She'll return to Hollywood in earnest next month with the sequel to Thor, followed by some very intriguing projects: a pair of Terrence Malick films, the troubled but well-scripted Jane' s Got a Gun, and her first directorial effort, A Tale of Love and Darkness.

Portman is one of our most well-liked actresses - in fact, she even scores more highly on that front than some of the big-name actors who rule our list, including Robert Downey Jr. and Leonardo DiCaprio. And she gets talked about just enough on the gossip pages, who coo about her marriage to hunky choreographer Benjamin Millipied and her baby Aleph without taking potshots. All in all, she's in a pretty good position ... let's just see if she can maintain the momentum she had before her brief break.

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The Twilight phenomenon has now been over for nearly a year, and Kristen Stewart finds herself the best positioned of the three main leads. (Though doing better than Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson right now is not exactly the highest bar to clear.) That said, she's safely entrenched in a second successful franchise, after Snow White and the Huntsman made nearly $400 million worldwide last year, and a sequel is in the works for 2015.

Which is not to say life is easy for Stewart. There was that whole "making out with her married director" gossip explosion from last year, a scandal ill-suited for a star already so awkward in the spotlight. Because of this blowup, it is not surprising that her gossip value is a perfect ten, while her likability bottoms out at 30, ten percentage points lower than it was last year. (The most common E-Score adjectives used to describe her: "overexposed, cold.") Her studio value is a middling 5.75, and it's not an encouraging sign that at one point, Universal was just going to make the Snow White sequel about the Huntsman, ditching the female lead of the franchise. (If Melissa McCarthy cheated with her Identity Thief director, there's no way anyone would consider making Identity Thief 2 without her.) Whether Stewart is the main draw for Snow White or not, she's still using it as a strong paycheck to give her the freedom to do more nuanced projects: Coming up, she has the Gitmo drama Camp X-Ray and Sils Maria, the English-language directing debut of Oliver Assayas. Her previous small-scale dramas have mostly fizzled out (On the Road, The Runaways), but her continued casting by these directors says a lot.

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Has there ever been more of a disparity between Hollywood and the rest of the country than when it comes to Michael Fassbender? Inside Hollywood, actors and directors are clamoring to work with the talented Irish-German star, and he's got a sky-high studio score on par with Ryan Gosling and Matt Damon. And yet, if you try to explain who Fassbender is to your uncle, you're going to have some trouble. Despite memorable co-leads in Prometheus and X-Men: First Class, and a 2011 awards season where George Clooney and friends made constant jokes about Fassbender's full-frontal nudity in the buzzed-about indie drama Shame, Fassbender has the lowest awareness level of anyone on this Most Valuable Stars list. According to E-Score, only nine out of every hundred people surveyed about celebrities could name Fassbender. (Though there's one silver lining: Of the people who knew him, he scored very favorably on likability.)

Can that awareness gap change in an era during which it's gotten harder and harder for new stars to break through? Fassbender will probably get a bump from this fall's awards juggernaut 12 Years a Slave, for which he's tipped to earn his first Oscar nomination as a ruthless slave owner (a role akin to the Ralph Fiennes part in Schindler's List, which also earned Fiennes an Oscar nod). But will that help people learn his name after three of Fassbender's giant blockbusters - Prometheus, X-Men, and Inglourious Basterds - already failed to do the job? Fassy's also bolstered by an ensemble full of A-listers in this fall's The Counselor, and he'll get an assist from every X-Men star who ever lived in next summer's megabudget X-Men: Days of Future Past, but if those don't coax people to finally learn his name, more's the pity: He'll simply have to remain Hollywood's best-kept secret.

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There was a point at which Emma Watson was going to give up acting. As the Harry Potter series wrapped, the starlet began to talk of retiring from her lifelong profession after she finished at Brown University, but clearly, something changed: Watson's on indefinite hiatus from college, passionately pursuing new roles that can help her gain distance from the megafranchise that made her name.

So far, she's stuck mostly to indies, with a mixed degree of success; she helped The Perks of Being a Wallflower earn decent numbers in limited release, though she couldn't quite bring life to Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring, despite the tabloid-friendly subject matter and "Watch Hermione pole-dance!' headlines. Still, both films - along with a likable cameo in raunchy comedy hit This Is the End - have helped her establish a new, game persona that is a long, long way from Hermione Granger.

Her studio score is on the low side, perhaps in part because she's been playing in the indies for a while. (Daniel Radcliffe has also been gravitating toward anti-Potter material, but he's already proven that he can draw a decent crowd outside of Hogwarts with The Woman in Black.) Next year's Noah should bridge the gap nicely: It's Watson's return to megabudget studio filmmaking, but with an indie auteur, Black Swan's Darren Aronofsky, at the helm.

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Nearly a year after the end of the Twilight franchise, Robert Pattinson could still use a little distance between himself and Edward Cullen. His close association with the vampire franchise is the most obvious answer to his very low likeability score; many men actively and disproportionately resent anyone associated with the franchise. He was a phenomenon with teenage girls and their mothers, but there were early signs that they wouldn't follow him outside the vampire tale: Water for Elephants should have been in his love-affair-threatened-by-outside-forces wheelhouse, but it ground to a halt at a mediocre $58.7 million.

The lesson Pattinson seemed to have taken away from this was that he had to get as far away from Twilight as possible by only doing small, counterintuitive films. It's similar to the post-Potter path taken by Daniel Radcliffe, but the problem is that Pattison's critic-bait movies haven't appealed to critics: Neither Bel Ami nor David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis got much better Metacritic scores than the Twilight movies, which is a low watermark indeed. (Neither film cracked seven-digit domestic grosses, either.)

His fans are still mesmerized by him outside of movie theaters: Pattinson's gossip value is at the top of the list, thanks to stubborn fascination with his relationship with Kristen Stewart. Studios give him a very middle-of-the-road 5.5, but his profile helps his small films get financing, and there are more on the way that aim to show him in new lights, including the Mad Max-like thriller The Rover from Animal Kingdom director David Michod. He's also playing a limo driver/wannabe actor in Maps to the Stars, and Col. T.E. Lawrence in Werner Herzog's Queen of the Desert. Enough of these quality projects could help wash away all talk of Team Edward, but it's going to take something special, and a whole lot of time.

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Despite being the star of the second biggest film in history, Kate Winslet hasn't been one to chase commercial success; in the fifteen years since, she's principally appeared in indie or awards-friendly fare like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Children, or her Oscar-winning turn in The Reader, with only the occasional atypical studio digression like The Holiday. But despite mostly low grosses and long absences from the screen, Winslet remains a solid property thanks to her critical favor, Oscar win, and evergreen popularity with the tabloids (to be fair, they're unlikely to lose interest when you marry someone with the last name Rocknroll ... )

It's two years since Winslet was last onscreen with Contagion and Carnage, but her lead role in Jason Reitman's Labor Day might yet have her in the award conversation this year. And perhaps more crucial, 2014 will see her in a key role in the potential young-adult blockbuster Divergent; with sequels already in development, that should keep her visible for some time to come. After that, there's some more traditional period fare to follow (Louis XIV-era gardening drama A Little Chaos, directed by Alan Rickman, and Jocelyn Moorhouse's Australia-set The Dressmaker), so don't expect Winslet to dip out of view again anytime soon.

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Over the short decade-plus that he's been a recognizable name, Jake Gyllenhaal's career has gone through several incarnations: from the young star of coming-of-agers like October Sky and Donnie Darko, to the critics' darling of The Good Girl and Brokeback Mountain, to the would-be action hero of Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time. But it's really only in the last few years that Gyllenhaal really seems to have found his place as the lead of modestly budgeted, well-reviewed films like Source Code, End Of Watch and Prisoners.

None blew up the box office, but the films were all made at a price and likely turned healthy profits, and it seems that Gyllenhaal can still draw enough of an audience, especially abroad: End Of Watch aside, his films generally perform better internationally, with Prince Of Persia quietly making a quarter of a billion dollars away from American jeering. Gossip editors are more interested in him than studios seem to be (thank you, Taylor Swift!), but within his lower-budget wheelhouse, he has significant value. His mind-bending doppelganger film Enemy (directed by Prisoners' Denis Villeneuve) recently had a mixed reception at Toronto, but he also has Nightcrawler coming (a crime thriller that he's producing and which forced him to bow out of Into the Woods) and Everest, with Josh Brolin.

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Aside from a cameo in Collateral and a more romantic role in Eat Pray Love, Javier Bardem has largely resisted taking the studio dollar, instead preferring to work with auteurs like Alejandro González Iñárritu, Woody Allen, and Julian Schnabel. But when the No Country for Old Men star was finally lured into a franchise role, he didn't disappoint: His uniquely machinating villain in the 007 film Skyfall was a key part of its appeal, and helped to make it the biggest Bond entry so far by a long shot, grossing over a billion dollars worldwide.

Bardem obviously can't take all the credit, but it helps explain why the star is rated so highly by studio bosses: Despite his relatively low awareness numbers and picky nature, executives know that if they can get him, he'll deliver something very special and memorable. (It's hard to think of another handsome Oscar winner who so revels in looking unpleasant.) He's showing signs of a willingness to play more within the studio tent, too; he's got Ridley Scott's The Counselor coming out this month, to be followed by The Gunman (a spy film with Sean Penn and Idris Elba) and A Most Violent Year, from Margin Call director J.C. Chandor.

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Matthew McConaughey landed firmly in the middle of this year's Most Valuable Stars list, but just wait until 2014: The 43-year-old actor is in the middle of a remarkable career resurgence that is in the process of paying dividends. Last year marked a real turnaround for the former king of junky rom-coms, as he proved his thespian bona fides in acclaimed indies like Killer Joe and Bernie, and rode a lascivious role in Magic Mike to the biggest hit of his career, a $113 million gross that surpassed How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Contact, and A Time to Kill. This year continued to restore McConaughey's luster, as Mud took home a very good $21 million in limited release, and he's almost certain to be nominated for his first Oscar for the affecting Dallas Buyers Club.

Now that McConaughey has impressed in indies, Hollywood is ready to give him the top-tier projects that eluded him during his cash-grab days: McConaughey just filmed his lead role in Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's 2014 sci-fier, which will surely be the actor's biggest film ever. It's a well-deserved comeback that sees the actor adding ever-increasing Metacritic numbers to his very high likability and tabloid scores. Finally, McConaughey has proved that he's more than just a pretty set of pecs.

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It seems clear at this point that there are two Christoph Waltzs: the one who plays villains in middling performers like The Green Hornet, Water For Elephants and The Three Musketeers, and the Christoph Waltz who stars in Quentin Tarantino movies. When he's working with his favorite auteur, Waltz is at his most visible, his most profitable (their two collaborations, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, grossed $700 million worldwide between them), and his most lauded, having won Best Supporting Actor for both films.

The actor's dilemma at this point is how to reconcile the two sides of his career. Waltz actually has one of the highest likability scores out there - impressive, given he made his name playing a Nazi - but that's the view of fans who actually know who he is. According to E-Score, the general awareness of him is one of the lowest of all the stars on this list. The tabloids have negligible interest in his personal life, so more extracurricular fare like his acclaimed Saturday Night Live hosting gig can help. Nevertheless, he's highly valued by the studios, and is attempting to carve out an identity away from Tarantino by working with other auteurs on non-villainous roles: He plays a depressed hacker in Terry Gilliam's futuristic The Zero Theorem and the husband of Amy Adams in Tim Burton's Big Eyes, and there are rumored in-the-works collaborations with John Hillcoat and (for a second time) Roman Polanski. And if those don't pan out, a European actor who can put a clever spin on psychopathy will never be without work as long as studios need villains for action movies (next up: Warner Bros.'s Tarzan). That Oscar imprimatur makes every explosion classier!

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It's been a good year for Amy Adams, one that brought her a fourth Oscar nomination (for her terrifying hand job in The Master) and a $289 million hit with Zack Snyder's Man of Steel. But we've got a problem here: After all those Oscar nods and all that box office, people still have no idea who Amy Adams is: Only 29 percent of people can name the actress who played Lois Lane, a very low awareness number compared to her peers. You're searching for a silver lining, we know. Here's one: She does have high likability and Metacritic scores. At least people enjoy her when they know her!

Is it because Adams disappears so artfully into her roles? This December, she'll be seen as a sexy con woman in David O. Russell's American Gangster and as a frazzled best friend in Spike Jonze's Her - that's some enviable range in films by two of today's most respected auteurs. Adams has successfully wriggled out of the good-girl typecasting that once seemed inevitable ... we just wish that more people knew enough about her to appreciate it.

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Although she's an Oscar nomine and has been declared a rising star for a few years now, Carey Mulligan's big mainstream coming-out party only came along this summer with The Great Gatsby. Sure, Wall Street 2 and Drive had provided her with some broader exposure, but only in comparison to the much smaller audiences for the indies that won her critical acclaim, An Education and Shame.

With Gatsby turning out to be a hit ($348.8 million worldwide), and Mulligan now married to the front man of one of the biggest bands in the world (Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons), her profile is rising, but her awareness level remains quite low at 10 percent, and within that in-the-know group, her likability is only at 54. (What's not to like? Don't blame her if you thought Gatsby was comically garish, blame Baz Luhrmann!) She's probably not going supernova in the near future, either; she tends to pick classy, prestige projects like the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis and the currently filming Far From the Madding Crowd, which is great for her critical clout (she has one of the highest Metacritic averages here), but less so for her asking price. Still, the studios give Mulligan a positive score. With a flourishing career, she could be the next Cate Blanchett.

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If you consider Jessica Chastain to be part of a new class of potential movie stars that includes Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Michael Fassbender - the ones, in short, who are not just beautiful but also really freakin' talented - she's already got a leg up on all five of those names: Of the moviegoers surveyed by E-Poll, Chastain had a higher awareness level than any of them. You can credit the one-two punch of Zero Dark Thirty and Mama for that, as the former brought in an impressive $95.7 million and earned Chastain an Oscar nod, while the latter was an early 2013 horror hit. Talented, humble, gorgeous, and a budding style icon ... it's no wonder directors want to work with her, and she's signed up for new projects from Christopher Nolan and Guillermo del Toro.

Though she's modest as all get out (have you visited the charming Facebook fan page she maintains herself?), Chastain has a high gossip score, owing to her red carpet fashion moments and her mystery beau, a dashing, wealthy Italian executive. People are intrigued by her, on and off screen, and they want more. Fortunately, this always-prolific actress is intent on giving her fans just that: In addition to the Nolan and Del Toro vehicles, she's got two-part drama The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, a new version of Miss Julie, and J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year on tap.

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Last year, we tipped Michelle Williams as one of the ten actors most likely to make it into the next Most Valuable Stars tally. And hey, look who snuck in! Williams had developed a nice reputation as a quality indie actress over the past few years, but she'd never really had an honest-to-goodness blockbuster; that all changed this year with Oz the Great and Powerful, where she scored an appealing part as Glinda, the only female role that doesn't eventually end up buried in mounds of makeup by the end of the movie (and in any subsequent sequels). More important, it signaled a willingness from Williams to play in the studio sandbox that she had long avoided.

But will she make the most of it? Her studio score is about the same as Naomi Watts, another blonde actress who mostly sticks to indie tearjerkers: Executives respect both actresses, they just don't expect either to turn up in their tentpoles all that often. And it's not as though Williams followed up Oz with a part in a Marvel movie: She went and shot the romance Suite Francaise, and if you couldn't tell by the title, it's an indie. Will Williams stay on the list next year? That one's up to her.

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It took a while for Penélope Cruz to find her footing in English-language movies, but Hollywood has finally realized that this Spanish star is capable of more than she was first given credit for. After eschewing love-interest roles to play more complicated characters in the indie hits Volver and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Hollywood began offering Cruz some better parts... even if the films themselves could use a little more work. She's now proven herself to be the best part of both Nine (for which she got an Oscar nomination) and the unnecessary Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, bringing something uniquely fierce and funny to both roles. So when will she get a studio movie that's worthy of her talents? Let's hope the star-studded The Counselor can deliver; we need a full-throated reminder of Cruz's talents after her glorified cameos as of late in To Rome With Love and I'm So Excited.

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The thespian embodiment of a joint, Jeff Bridges takes a relaxed approach to his career that even a work-shirking layabout like the Dude from The Big Lebowski could approve of: He does what he likes, when he feels like it. After a massive 2010, during which Bridges won the Oscar and starred in True Grit and Tron: Legacy, he vanished from the screen for three years. Maybe that's the reason Bridges has never quite had the major-draw marquee value of prolific peers like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro; a lot of that, too, has to do with his general, career-long preference for smart adult dramas over louder action fare. But there's no denying that as Bridges has hit his sixties, he has become an avatar of cool. His cultlike Lebowski following only helps to burnish that image, but Bridges himself comes across as someone who's appealingly bemused by Hollywood, and his "hey, man" vernacular and general hippie vibe have helped to give him a welcome, mellow glow onscreen and off.

Let's just hope he doesn't coast on that goodwill. He's come out relatively unscathed from some recent flops; if anything, the movies are blamed for letting him down. Tron: Legacy? How dare they besmirch the memory of Bridges's original! (Which, in reality, wasn't that good either.) And even though Bridges looked like he was just doing a hyped-up retread of Rooster Cogburn in R.I.P.D., his co-star Ryan Reynolds took the hit for that one. We're a little worried that Bridges still hasn't learned his lesson from those two failures: January's Seventh Son (based on a children's fantasy series) sees him playing a grizzled, mumbly, magical mentor to a young fighter of evil in what looks like a very busy CGI assault. A couple more paycheck movies and he'll lose his elusive cool to become one of those elder statesmen who cash in so often that their presence is devalued. Still, there is some hope on the horizon: Bridges is currently producing a longtime passion project, based on Lois Lowry's Newbery Medal-winning YA novel The Giver, in which he'll star opposite Meryl Streep.

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How is it possible that Julianne Moore, one of our most versatile and talented actresses, has never won an Oscar? She's been nominated four times, to be sure, but none of those powerhouse performances (in Boogie Nights, The Hours, Far From Heaven, and The End of the Affair) took home the gold. Can you blame Moore, then, for her recent, most fervent embrace of big studio movies? Yes, her work in Carrie, the upcoming FX actioner The Seventh Son, and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay probably won't win her many trophies, but at least they'll provide the big paychecks that Moore doesn't get for her usual indies.

Moore's scores are mostly average: She's got a decent studio ranking, owing to her easy-to-work-with reputation and excellent performances, while her Metacritic score and likability are both middle-of-the-pack. (For every few critical victories like A Single Man or The Kids Are All Right, there's a clunker like 6 Souls.) At an age when many of her peers have transitioned to cable TV, Moore continues to make movies, aside from a few scattered episodes of 30 Rock. Basically, she's a workhorse who's never lacking for projects, and is often the most reliable performer in them. Can you really ask for more from Moore?

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Naomi Watts is one of our most acclaimed and dependable actresses; she has two Best Actress Oscar nominations under her belt (for 21 Grams and last year's The Impossible) and her presence in a film is often enough to get Oscar pundits prognosticating. Yet her preference for agonizingly serious roles keeps Watts's profile relatively low for someone of her caliber. She's a critical favorite, but not a mainstream name - which is likely fine with her, considering her aversion to flashy tentpoles. (She hasn't done one since 2005's King Kong.)

At first blush, Watts's upcoming slate is filled with smile-free fare: Already seen in the painfully earnest mother-lover drama Adore, she's got the poverty drama Sunlight Jr and the derided Diana biopic on deck in the coming months. But! Could Watts be ready to turn that frown upside down? She's recently filmed the star-packed comedy St. Vincent de Van Nuys with Bill Murray, and she'll play Ben Stiller's wife in the new Noah Baumbach film, While We're Young. Even her reteam with the reliably depressing Alejandro González Iñárritu for Birdman is a step in the right direction: Though Iñárritu directed the downer 21 Grams, this one is said to be a comedy. Maybe lightening up is exactly what Watts needs right now; we know she can play the hell out of sad, beleaguered, and depressed, but we kind of miss that screwball blonde who turned up in David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees. Perhaps a reunion with that master of comedy and drama is overdue?

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It's taken a little while for Colin Firth to reach the A-list, but by following the surprise megahit Mamma Mia with an Oscar nod for A Single Man and then a win for The King' s Speech, Firth has firmly cemented his place there; he's well-liked among the public and studios alike. That said, some of his post-Oscar choices have been questionable: Almost no one saw poorly reviewed indie Arthur Newman (it took a mere $200,000 domestically), and the Cameron Diaz team-up Gambit remains unreleased in the U.S, almost a year after it hit the rest of the world to bad box office and worse notices. Colin! We were rooting for you!

But the sheen clearly hasn't completely worn off, as Firth's slate is stacked in 2014. Harvey Weinstein picked up The Railway Man out of the Toronto International Film Festival for another potential awards run, and Firth will also appear in the thriller Before I Go to Sleep and family film Paddington. (Curiously, all three of those films co-star Nicole Kidman, who is not currently a great omen for box-office success.) More crucial, Firth is also starring with Emma Stone in Woody Allen's next and is venturing into tentpole territory for the first time with Matthew Vaughn's actioner The Secret Service. The latter, in particular, has the potential to win him a younger crowd than his currently more middle-aged fan base.

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He doesn't quite look like a matinee idol, and that name doesn't exactly drip off the tongue, but Benedict Cumberbatch has made an impression on Hollywood. Credit the BBC's Sherlock, which gave Cumberbatch his first breakthrough starring role (and led to his legion of self-professed lovestruck "Cumberbitches"). Hollywood began to take notice, and after popping up in supporting roles in a few of 2011's finest (War Horse, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Cumberbatch spent the following year ensuring that he would be everywhere in 2013. The tidal wave began with Star Trek Into Darkness, J.J. Abrams's highly anticipated sci-fi sequel, which made $228 million at home and over double that globally. But it raised Cumberbatch's profile long before the film even opened: Abrams's endless coyness (and outright lies) about which villain Cumberbatch would play ensured that he was constantly on fanboys' minds and radar.

This fall, he should prove impossible to ignore: He'll appear as Julian Assange in The Fifth Estate, alongside Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep in August: Osage County, and in a supporting role in likely awards magnet 12 Years a Slave, making for an Oscar-bait hat trick. In addition, he'll be voicing two roles in The Desolation of Smaug, Peter Jackson's follow-up to the $1 billion worldwide grosser The Hobbit; considering one of those roles is the titular dragon, Smaug, expect him to be a major part of the press onslaught. With his star on the rise, Cumberbatch has now proved bankable enough to draw film projects originally eyed for gents like Michael Fassbender (Imitation Game) and Brad Pitt (The Lost City of Z). And then there's the wildly anticipated third season of Sherlock, the sets of which are proving a paparazzi magnet in London. Tumblr is going to need more server space.

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Keira Knightley fled from big-budget studio films after making three installments of Pirates of the Caribbean, instead seeking out intense dramas (that, admittedly, still usually put her in corsets). Last year, she seemed to be tentatively testing out less serious waters, teaming with Steve Carell in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, though that was a disappointment at $7.1 million domestic. She's still drawn to thoughtful fare - upcoming projects include Noah Baumbach's adaptation of The Emperor's Children, mumblecore matriarch Lynn Shelton's Laggies, and the WWII drama The Imitation Game - but she will get the most attention for her reentry into studio films, as Chris Pine's wife in Christmas Day's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

Her Metacritic average is on the high end, commensurate with the highbrow projects she chooses, but E-Score finds that only 30 percent of people know who she is, a surprising number for a star who was so prominent in three Pirates movies that cumulatively grossed over a billion dollars in the U.S. She seems to be following a Kate Winslet template with her post-blockbuster career choices, but Winslet will always be linked with Titanic (giving her an eternal box-office glow), while Johnny Depp is the main thing people remember from Pirates. It may just be that Knightley has little taste for what the studios are selling, but let's see if Jack Ryan manages to turn her head.

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Sean Penn has only been a sporadic presence on screens over the last decade, popping in for films that are either political (Milk, Fair Game), director-driven (Tree of Life), or out of left field (This Must Be the Place). Mostly, his attention has been focused on his activist work for victims of natural disasters all over the planet; it's as if he does movies just to keep his SAG insurance. He has a small role as a photographer in Ben Stiller's upcoming Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but Penn has recently showed hints of taking his career in a tough-old-guy Liam Neeson-y direction: After his turn as Mickey Cohen in the underwhelming Gangster Squad, he's now filming the very Neeson-y The Gunman, playing a spy who has to clear his name before being killed. (Director: Taken's Pierre Morel.)

But unlike the workaholic Neeson, you never know when Penn will lose interest and vanish from screens for another couple of years. He's still very highly respected as an actor, though his likability score remains unsurprisingly and habitually low (he will forever be painted by many with the "guy who swings at paparazzi" and "damn liberal!" brushes). His studio value is a 6.75, which signals that he's a valued actor, but not someone whose presence is going to drastically boost a gross - two Oscars (and three nominations) be damned. Maybe a mainstream hit is just what he needs right now.

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Fine, Jesse Eisenberg is not the most well-known or even well-liked man in Hollywood. But he's not supposed to be well-known or well-liked - Jesse Eisenberg is the neurotic nerd king, the tense guy whom you cast in movies about Facebook and hipster relationships and … magic? Frankly, the success of Now You See Me was one of 2013's biggest surprises, but it restores some of Eisenberg's market value (after 2011's disappointing Social Network follow-up, the comedy 30 Minutes or Less). 2014's Rio 2 and a potential Now You See Me sequel should keep him all set in the studio and financial departments, which will leave Eisenberg free to do as many smaller films (Night Moves, The Double) and plays as he likes.

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