Amy Ryan can make a welcome feel faintly threatening. We rate her understated supporting work, which makes room for other actors while giving us reason to look twice at the person offering to help.
Fi1m perspective
In Beau Is Afraid (2023), Amy Ryan’s Grace is far too pleased to have a guest. She and Nathan Lane, playing Roger, make the couple’s kindness feel conditional. We felt uneasy in their company because their eagerness to look after Beau never seemed quite generous. The pastel house Crombie gives them helps, with Beau’s borrowed grey clothes making him look conspicuously out of place.
Capote (2005), directed by Bennett Miller, casts her as Marie Dewey, the sheriff’s wife, alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman. Ryan is one member of a company built around Hoffman, whose performance makes the writer’s exploitation of trust painfully human. The part is an early example of the ensemble work on which her screen reputation rests. Miller’s film is absorbing and superbly acted, though the screenplay spends more time on its subject’s failings than his talent.
The breakthrough came with Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone (2007), in which she played Helene McCready, a harder-edged part that drew attention to her dramatic strength. Her recurring role as Holly Flax in The Office (2008–2011) put her alongside Steve Carell and made more use of her light comic timing. She is good at letting a supporting part remain a supporting part without making it anonymous.
Beau Is Afraid also shows the limit of what this sort of acting can do for a film. Ryan and Lane occupy its best-written stretch, but Ari Aster keeps going long after the film has lost its shape, and their scenes cannot correct that. Her work is a reason to endure some of its excesses, not a reason to deny them. For an evening with fewer reservations, start with Capote; return to Grace when there is patience for three hours of dread.
Biography
Amy Ryan is an American actress. She was born Amy Beth Dziewiontkowski on 3 May 1968 in Queens, New York City. She trained at the High School of Performing Arts and began her professional stage career in 1987, appearing in the national tour of Biloxi Blues immediately after graduation. Her Broadway debut came in 1993.
Ryan received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for her role as Helene McCready in Gone Baby Gone (2007). She is also known for playing Beadie Russell in the HBO series The Wire, Holly Flax in The Office, and Sylvia in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014). Other film credits include Changeling (2008), Bridge of Spies (2015) and Beau Is Afraid (2023), in which she played Grace. She has received multiple Tony Award nominations for her stage work.
