[Trending News] Every Oscar-Nominated Performance of a US President, Ranked

Sebastian Stan, star of the sordid young-Trump biopic The Apprentice, probably won’t win on Sunday, but he’ll have made Oscar history just the same: He’s the first actor nominated for an Academy Award for playing the current president. And no, it’s not an uplifting portrayal of the current White House occupant.

Since the dawn of the Oscars, eight other actors have garnered nominations for playing American presidents. It’s an eclectic bunch, from Raymond Massey’s earnest turn as Honest Abe to Anthony Hopkins’s sweaty, shifty portrayal of Richard Nixon to a Woodrow Wilson biopic that’s been long-forgotten. The presidential biopic has come a long way from the middlebrow, mainstream fare of yesteryear to something as depraved as The Apprentice, no doubt reflecting a deeper corruption of Americans’ faith in our leaders. I spent a few weeks watching every one of the presidential performances to grace Academy history to bring you this definitive ranking.

A caveat: these movies are ranked according to my assessment of the performance, not the film overall — though, of course, these things are intimately linked. 

9. Alexander Knox, Wilson (1944)

President: Woodrow Wilson
Nominated: Best Actor

The passion project of producer Darryl F. Zanuck, this lavish biopic of Woodrow Wilson, shot in gleaming Technicolor, failed to incite similar passion in moviegoers. Zanuck hoped the movie would take off like Gone With the Wind. Instead, it bombed at the box office, failing to recoup its extravagant $5.2 million budget. It did, however, impress critics and amass 10 Oscar nominations, including for its star, Alexander Knox. 

Wilson doesn’t hold up. Despite a solid cast (which includes a young Vincent Price) and gorgeous photography, it’s the kind of blandly reverential biopic that opens with Wilson’s wife encouraging him to run for governor by exclaiming, “But Woodrow, you’ve always been interested in politics!” Eventually, Wilson becomes president, and we get the typical biopic clichés: dramatic newspaper headlines; wartime newsreels; the commander-in-chief huddled with advisors on a tense reelection night, gazing forlornly at a portrait of George Washington amid crisis, feeding inspirational wisdom to starstruck soldiers during wartime. (What we don’t get: any mention of Wilson’s racist views or his segregation of the federal government.) 

Knox does his best with the material, but the performance feels humorless and wooden, no pun intended. In what should be an emotional scene, he proposes to his second wife in a tone nearly as solemn as that with which he later asks Congress for a declaration of war. In this Technicolor haze, the 28th president is honorable to a fault. The hagiography is thick, though the patriotic tone, and third-act focus on Wilson’s forceful campaigning to establish a League of Nations, are major hints that this thing was made during World War II. 

Fun fact: The movie bombed so hard that producer Zanuck reportedly forbade people from so much as mentioning it in his presence. 

8. James Whitmore, Give ‘em Hell, Harry! (1975)

President: Harry S. Truman
Nominated: Best Actor

Here’s a bizarre outlier from Oscar history. Give ‘em Hell, Harry! is not actually a movie but a videorecording of a one-man stage show, starring James Whitmore as a foul-mouthed, fast-talking Harry S. Truman. As the opening text states, the play “was captured with all its immediacy, unchanged in any way,” audience laughter and all. It’s not bad, exactly, but it’s hardly a motion picture. Why this was deemed eligible for an Oscar — in a year with no shortage of phenomenal movies — I cannot say.

The “movie” is like watching Truman deliver an SNL monologue for 104 minutes. From his desk, the fictionalized Truman engages the crowd at a mile-a-minute clip: telling stories about his predecessors Abraham Lincoln and Chester A. Arthur, savagely roasting Adlai Stevenson, reminiscing about his 1948 upset over Thomas E. Dewey, ranting about the Korean War and McCarthyism. He also engages in a heated argument with Douglas MacArthur (whose side of the conversation is left to our imagination), demonstrating his famous loathing of the general. 

Is Give ‘em Hell, Harry! a worthwhile curiosity? Sure. Is it educational? Certainly. But Whitmore’s turn as Truman can hardly be evaluated as a screen performance, because it was meant to be seen on stage. 

Fun fact: Give ‘em Hell, Harry! is one of three movies whose entire credited cast was nominated for an Oscar.

7. Raymond Massey, Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940)

President: Abraham Lincoln
Nominated: Best Actor

Sometimes two similarly themed movies arrive around the same time and compete for the same audience. Remember the Antz vs. A Bug’s Life showdown of the late ’90s? A similar fate befell John Cromwell’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) — based on the play of the same name — which had the misfortune of hitting theaters less than a year after John Ford’s superior Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Cromwell’s film is hokey in the manner of many Golden Age-era biopics, zipping through the major beats of Lincoln’s pre-White House life (tragic love for Ann Rutledge, courtship of Mary Todd, campaign for senate) without much of an overarching theme or idea.

Though the movie bombed at the box office, it earned a Best Actor nomination for Raymond Massey — who, despite being Canadian, remains the only actor to portray Lincoln in not one but two feature films and on television. In Abe Lincoln in Illinois, he certainly looks the part, though he lacks the soulfulness and relaxed humor of Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln. Massey’s Lincoln is serious and brooding and a little bit stilted. He affixes a weird vibrato to his voice when delivering the famous “House Divided” speech and sounds a bit like he’s reading from a teleprompter when asking for Mary Todd’s hand in marriage. Still, for a Hollywood survey of Lincoln’s formative years, this is perfectly watchable. 

Fun fact: Massey also played Lincoln in two separate television adaptations of Abe Lincoln in Illinois and in the 1962 epic How the West Was Won. Talk about being typecast. 

6. Sam Rockwell, Vice (2018)

President: George W. Bush
Nominated: Best Supporting Actor

The eight Oscar nominations amassed by Vice, Adam McKay’s audacious, third-wall-breaking Dick Cheney biopic, haven’t aged well. The movie is basically generic-brand Oliver Stone for MSNBC junkies. Despite an engrossing storyline, McKay’s script is overstuffed with narrative gimmicks and has a tendency to spoon-feed information to the viewer, like it was designed for eighth graders learning about the Iraq War.

Yet even its detractors have to admit Vice is full of strong performances, particularly Christian Bale’s prosthetic-assisted transformation into the sinister veep. You may be thinking, “Hey, Dick Cheney wasn’t a U.S. president!” That’s true (though the movie argues he was as powerful as one), but Sam Rockwell also garnered an Oscar nod for playing George W. Bush. He does a fine job, bringing some comical bite to moments like Bush gnawing on a chicken wing while he persuades Cheney to be his running mate. He persuasively portrays Dubya as a recovering party animal happy to hand the reins of real power over to his second-in-command. But I can’t help thinking a more deserving nomination could have gone to Steve Carell, who goes full sleazeball warmonger as Cheney’s trigger-happy mentor, Donald Rumsfeld. 

Fun fact: Sam Rockwell also plays a lefty journalist in a different movie on this list. The man has range! 

5. Anthony Hopkins, Amistad (1997)

President: John Quincy Adams
Nominated: Best Supporting Actor

One of the few major Hollywood movies to deal directly with slavery, Amistad is an underrated Spielberg historical epic doomed to be overshadowed by superior Spielberg epics. It’s also a movie that includes two U.S. presidents as characters yet is a biopic of neither.

Amistad portrays the 1839 slave revolt aboard the ship of the same name and the subsequent courtroom battle to determine those slaves’ legal status. The cause of the captives — Africans who were illegally kidnapped from modern-day Sierra Leone — is taken up by American abolitionists, as well as former president John Quincy Adams, then a U.S. representative. It’s a fascinating story, if overly centered on the American lawyers instead of the slaves themselves. 

As Adams, Anthony Hopkins, sporting flowing white sideburns, outshines his co-stars (an underutilized Morgan Freeman, a wig-wearing Matthew McConaughey), portraying the former president as a frail old man who seems to derive strength from the fortitude of his moral convictions. Though a side character for most of the movie, Hopkins emerges as a key player in the third act, delivering a stirring, 11-minute courtroom monologue about slavery, the founding fathers and man’s innate desire to be free. He hardly even seems to be acting.

Fun fact: Anthony Hopkins is the only person who has given Oscar-nominated performances as two different U.S. presidents. 

4. Sebastian Stan, The Apprentice (2024)

President: Donald Trump
Nominated: Best Actor

With The Apprentice, Sebastian Stan becomes the first actor nominated for an Oscar for playing the sitting president — though Trump wasn’t the sitting president when the film was made, nor is he president in the film itself. Not a full-scale Trump biopic — we’re still living in it, baby — this sordidly gripping period piece offers a portrait of the sociopath as a young man, and a glimpse of how power shifted in New York between the sleazy ’70s and the glitzy ’80s. Its focal point is the relationship between the young businessman and his mentor, the diabolical, power-crazed lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, in a phenomenal performance), revealing how Trump internalized Cohn’s amoral playbook yet discarded the man himself when he was no longer useful. It’s a novel approach to understanding one of the most analyzed humans in history, more villain origin story than presidential biopic. 

Strong’s is the standout performance, but Stan nails a very tricky assignment. He manages to capture bits of Trump’s essence — the perpetual sneer, the hyperbolic speech, the arrogant body language, the pronunciation of “terrible” — without succumbing to imitation. Shocking moments, like a scene in which he rapes then-wife Ivana (which is based on a court deposition), have attracted the most attention, but Stan embodies the character more convincingly in little moments: lashing out at Ed Koch, or telling off Cohn with a mouthful of cheeseballs. As the film moves from 1973 to 1986, Stan’s Trump becomes more and more recognizable to us as the figure we know today.

Fun fact: The movie was financed in part by pro-Trump billionaire Dan Snyder, who apparently believed it would be a flattering portrayal of his buddy Donald. 

3. Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon (2008)

President: Richard Nixon
Nominated: Best Actor

In 2008-2009, Oscar voters ignored the presidential biopic du jour, Oliver Stone’s uneven W., in favor of Ron Howard’s solidly crafted, comfortably middlebrow Frost/Nixon. Adapted from Peter Morgan’s play, the film squeezes as much drama as it can out of TV host David Frost’s series of 1977 interviews with disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon. 

The problem with Frost/Nixon is that the stakes aren’t really that high. Nixon’s political career is already over when the movie begins, and any viewer knows he isn’t going to mount a comeback. But Frank Langella, who plays Nixon, as he did in the stage production, makes us care. He lets us see the interviews as Nixon saw them — a heated battle of wits with a lightweight opponent. And, more importantly, as a crucial chance to rehabilitate his image, show remorse without actually admitting lawbreaking and make a return to public life. 

At times, Langella’s performance feels closer to a caricature than Anthony Hopkins’s in Nixon. He’s all jowly and scowling and grievance-obsessed, seeming closer to 80 than 64 (Nixon’s age at the time), and he overdoes it with the marble-mouthed delivery. But as the interviews begin and the film becomes a two-man psychological thriller, Langella’s portrayal of a tormented man overwhelmed by the weight of shattered ego and regret is captivating to watch. Much as he channels the ex-pres when delivering infamous Nixonisms like “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” he seems even more like Nixon in private moments of weirdness: say, awkwardly petting a dachshund, or grumbling about the “effeminate” nature of Frost’s Italian shoes. 

Fun fact: The pivotal scene where Nixon drunk-dials Frost at night was fictionalized. 

2. Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln (2012)

President: Abraham Lincoln
Won: Best Actor

The quintessential screen portrayal of America’s most beloved president comes courtesy of a Shakespearean-trained British guy. Go figure. Steven Spielberg grew up worshipping John Ford, and here he crafts an unofficial companion piece to Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln: another portrait of Lincoln focused on a pivotal juncture of his life instead of a full biographical arc. It’s a credit to Daniel Day-Lewis’s deeply layered performance that you can’t really imagine anyone else in the title role.

Part character study, part political thriller, Lincoln dramatizes the 16th president’s dogged efforts during the final days of the Civil War to secure a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. Spielberg’s optimistic take on the moral arc of history contrasts with Oliver Stone’s more paranoid visions of American empire. But Day-Lewis’s performance complicates that optimism, letting us see a deep weariness within Lincoln’s spirit, a desperation to achieve a moral goal even via sleazily political means, and the unresolved grief he carried around each day in his turbulent marriage to Mary Todd. It’s a portrait of Lincoln that makes room for uncertainty amid all his eloquent oratory (and yes, that high-pitched voice is historically accurate).

Fun fact: For this performance, Day-Lewis became the first actor to win an Oscar for playing a U.S. president. (And the first to win an Oscar for a Spielberg-directed performance.) 

1. Anthony Hopkins, Nixon (1995)

President: Richard Nixon
Nominated: Best Actor

Nixon is the greatest presidential biopic because it’s the only one really attuned to the soul-destroying evil of the American presidency. Oliver Stone’s three-hour epic is a tragedy in the classical sense, a sprawling story of a once-great man, haunted by demons, undone by his own fatal flaws and implicated by the sins of a deep-state apparatus he cannot control. 

As Tricky Dick, Anthony Hopkins captures the disgraced president’s hunched gait and scowling manner, his pinched croak of a voice and foul-mouthed speech. He broods and boozes in a paranoid haze. But more crucially, he embodies a certain desperation to be liked, a lifelong torment that seemed to haunt Nixon from his childhood trauma to his wounding 1960 election loss to his embattled White House days, when he seemed consumed by enemies both real and imagined as the Watergate scandal became his undoing. 

It’s a cliché of presidential biopics that our hero wanders the halls of the White House, gazing at portraits of Washington or Jefferson, seeking their wisdom. A pivotal scene in Nixon flips the cliché, with the 37th president, besieged by scandal, staring at a portrait of his one-time rival John F. Kennedy instead. “They look at you, they see what they want to be,” he mutters sorrowfully. “They look at me, they see what they are.” No screen portrayal has ever made the presidency seem so miserable. 

Fun fact: While prepping for the role, Hopkins listened to Nixon speeches at night as he fell asleep so his subconscious mind would absorb the president’s character.

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