15 Stars Who Broke Out at Sundance in the Last 15 Years

The Sundance Film Festival may be the kick-off for every New Year’s lineup of indie cinema players, but it has movie star roots. After all, the festival was co-founded by Robert Redford as the Utah/U.S. Film Festival in 1978, back before the actor drew from the name of his famous cowboy character and rechristened it the Sundance Film Festival in 1978.

It’s fitting, then, that Sundance has been a launching ground for new movie stars ever since, a tradition that it continues to this day. Some of the most exciting young actors of the last decade had their first major roles in films that premiered at Sundance, including these 15 future screen legends.

Michael B. Jordan – Fruitvale Station (2013)

As demonstrated by Sinners‘ march through awards season, director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan are one of the most exciting creative pairs in cinema today. Before the two worked together for stories about vampires or Wakanda, they did a more grounded, realistic project. Fruitvale Station recreates the last day in the life of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old who was murdered by police at the titular train stop.

Coogler and Jordan restore humanity to a man too often reduced to a news item, putting Jordan’s movie star charisma to good work. Fruitvale Station went on to win the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film at Sundance that year, fully transforming Jordan from the kid in The Wire to a cinematic talent to watch.

Brie Larson – The Spectacular Now (2013)

Like Jordan, Brie Larson first appeared on screen as a kid in a TV show, appearing as one of Bob Saget’s kids in the sitcom Raising Dad and later putting in supporting roles in Hoot and Scott Pilgrim vs the World. But it was a pair of independent films in 2013 that transformed Larson from an able secondary player to exciting lead, starting with The Spectacular Now.

Directed by James Ponsoldt and based on the novel by Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now follows a charismatic high school senior (played by an actor we’ll talk about in a moment), whose alcoholism gets the best of him when he’s dumped by his girlfriend. As the girlfriend who sets off the chain of events and not the one who puts the protagonist back together—that job went to Shailene Woodley—Larson has the difficult task of keeping viewers on the side of a complicated person, a talent she’ll only further develop in her other 2013 movie, Short Term 12. Which, by the by, also got its start at a festival, albeit SXSW.

Miles Teller – The Spectacular Now (2013) / Whiplash (2014)

As great as Larson is in The Spectacular Now, she did have to play support to another young star making his major movie debut at Sundance. Miles Teller has the role of destructive cool kid Sutter Keely, and must keep the audience pulling for him despite his shortcomings.

Teller returned to Sundance the next year, too, to build on the heat generated by The Spectacular Now with what still remains his best work. In director Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Teller puts in an electrifying turn as a talented but arrogant drummer who faces off against a cruel teacher (J.K. Simmons). It put Teller and Chazelle on the map, leading to bucolic musicals in the Hollywood Hills and a trip for Teller straight into the danger zone.

Tessa Thompson – Dear White People (2014)

Over the past decade, Tessa Thompson has played everything from an Asgardian warrior to a physicist who turns into flowers in Annihilation to, most recently, an upper-class malcontent in Hedda. While she showed hints of such range in early projects such as Veronica Mars and For Colored Girls, they truly came to the fore in the Justin Simien-directed comedy, Dear White People.

As the wry author and sharp-witted radio host Sam White, Thompson gets to play high status and embody the transgression implied in the film’s title. But she really showed off her skills in the movie’s second half when Sam has to confront some truths about herself and her school.

Anya Taylor-Joy – The Witch (2015)

Ten years later, it’s hard to remember just how challenging The Witch seemed upon release (and 11 years ago for Sundance-goers). Robert Eggers’ film certainly had some traditional horror elements but its use of period-accurate language and its punishingly-bleak tone set The Witch apart from other movies about creepy, cackling women. Much of the movie’s success therefore came from Anya Taylor-Joy‘s ability to ground the movie as the Puritan girl Thomasin. With her uncanny wide eyes and ability to convey both fear and interest with just a lift of the eyebrows, Taylor-Joy made The Witch a hit, which in turn cemented her to one of the most reliably great young actors in Hollywood.

Florence Pugh – Lady Macbeth (2016)

Okay, we’re fudging a bit here since Lady Macbeth opened at TIFF in September 2026 and then BFI London Film Festival in October before making its U.S. premiere at Sundance in January 2017. But since we’re talking about Florence Pugh, we’ll gladly make an exception. Pugh’s legion of fans may love her turns in Midsommar and Thunderbolts, but the internal resilience and passionate depths she brings to her characters were already present in Lady Macbeth.

In this adaptation of the novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov, directed by William Oldroyd and written by Alice Birch, Pugh stars as a 19th century woman who rebels against her loveless marriage to a cruel older man. It’s familiar ground for a period piece, but Pugh made it all feel new and undiscovered.

Timothée Chalamet – Call Me By Your Name (2017)

As Marty Supreme reminds us, any movie that ends with Timothée Chalamet crying is going to be great. And with no disrespect to Marty Mauser’s kid, no movie has done that better than Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino and James Ivory’s soulful story about a teen boy’s romance with an older man (Armie Hammer) in 1980s Italy. Chalamet brings to life the curious adolescent from the André Aciman novel, making his unique experience seem universal—especially in the final shot, in which Chalamet quietly sobs in front of the fireplace while a Sufjan Stevens song plays.

Margaret Qualley – Novitiate (2017)

If there’s a recent actress who rivals Chalamet as a rising star, it might be Margaret Qualley of The Substance. The daughter of Andie MacDowell, Qualley had appeared in The Leftovers and The Nice Guys. But it was the Sundance film Novitiate that first put her in the lead. In Novitiate, Qualley plays a nun-in-training who doubts her faith, especially under the rigors imposed by the cruel Mother Superior (Melissa Leo). The conflict that Qualley embodies helped Novitiate earn a Grand Jury Prize nomination and another Jury Prize for writer/director Maggie Betts.

LaKeith Stanfield – Crown Heights (2017)

LaKeith Stanfield may have made his film debut alongside Brie Larson in Short Term 12, but he didn’t take the center stage until Crown Heights premiered at Sundance. Between those two projects, Stanfield had memorable turns in Selma, Dope, and Atlanta, but Crown Heights was the first to prove that this idiosyncratic performer can carry a feature film.

For Crown Heights, writer-director Matt Ruskin adapts a This American Life, a story the about wrongfully-convicted inmate Colin Warner and how he finally gets released through the work of his friend Carl King. Alongside Nnamdi Asomugha as King, Stanfield plays Warner as both rightly angry but resiliently hopeful, using his unique energy to keep the audience riveted.

Harris Dickinson – Beach Rats (2017)

Harris Dickinson hasn’t had quite the same big roles as some of the others on this list, but he’s electric in them all. In indie favorites such as Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl, and The Iron Claw, Dickinson brings a genuine openness while retaining a human element in even the most outre indie. He demonstrated that skill in his first major film role, the coming-of-age drama Beach Rats from write-director Eliza Hittman. In Beach Rats, Dickinson plays a wayward Brooklyn teen who avoids facing his homosexuality by engaging in increasingly reckless and dangerous behavior with his friends.

Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out (2017)

Just because Sundance is associated with small, independent movies doesn’t mean that the festival cannot debut an Oscar-winning blockbuster. Such was the case when Jordan Peele’s Get Out premiered there on Jan. 23, 2017 before it became a culture-defining horror film, thanks in part to an incredible lead performance by Daniel Kaluuya. While Kaluuya came to the part with memorable credits in Black Mirror and Sicario, it was Get Out that established him as one of the most exciting performers of his generation. As the conflict-adverse Chris Washington, Kaluuya proved that he could create a three-dimensional character with just the furrow of his brow and a widening of his eyes.

Thomasin McKenzie – Leave No Trace (2018)

Thomasin McKenzie hails from New Zealand, which means that her first film role came, of course, in a Peter Jackson movie, which for her was via an uncredited contribution to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. But it was a much smaller American film that really caught viewers’ attention, appearing alongside Ben Foster in Debra Granik’s sensitive drama Leave No Trace. McKenzie plays Tom, the teenage daughter and de facto caretaker of a PTSD-stricken veteran. Though playing younger than she actually was at the time, McKenzie was still a teen while shooting Leave No Trace. Nonetheless, she believably embodied a girl forced to abandon her childhood to help her troubled parent.

Emilia Jones – CODA (2021)

While not the first Sundance film to win an Academy Award, CODA feels like the most Sundance movie to ever get the honor. Written and directed by Sian Heder and based on the French movie La Famille Bélier, CODA stars Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi, a child of deaf adults or a CODA. After that film became a surprise awards titan, Jones has gone on to build an impressive career, appearing just last year in Edgar Wright’s The Running Man and beside Mark Ruffalo in the HBO crime drama, Task.

Daisy Edgar-Jones – Fresh (2022)

Before playing Noa, a romantic hopeful who gets targeted by a charming cannibal (Sebastian Stan) in Mimi Cave’s horror-comedy Fresh, Daisy Edgar-Jones already had an impressive resume. In addition to acclaimed stage work in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Edgar-Jones had main cast parts on Cold Feet and War of the Worlds. But it was her ability to play both a woman falling in love and a survivor fighting against her attacker in Fresh that changed the course of her career. Since then, Edgar-Jones has chased tornadoes in Twisters and will try to find love and stability in a new version of Sense & Sensibility, coming this year.

David Jonsson – Rye Lane (2023)

For most readers, English actor David Jonsson caught their attention as a sensitive synth in Alien: Romulus and then truly became one to watch alongside Cooper Hoofman in last year’s The Long Walk. But Jonsson came to those films with a lead actor credit already under his belt, having starred in Rye Lane, from director Raine Allen-Miller and writers Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia. This gentle romantic comedy plays like a South London spin on Before Sunrise as Jonsson stars alongside Vivian Oparah as two strangers who spend the day together after a chance encounter.