In an era of niche culture, algorithmic bubbles and online echo chambers, it’s harder than ever to have broad appeal, but these 10 performers managed to turn heads by being bold, breaking away from the pack.
Television
Owen Cooper
When Owen Cooper won a best supporting Emmy in September at age 15, it was for an emotionally complex, tumultuous role that could have challenged the most seasoned actor. But the performance in the four-part Netflix mini-series “Adolescence” — as Jamie, a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a classmate after having been radicalized by misogynistic ideas online — was his acting debut.
The topic couldn’t have been much heavier or more current, and the show — a surprise hit after its March release, quickly becoming the most-watched show on Netflix in dozens of countries — touched off debates about smartphone use and the harmful content peddled to boys and men online.
In his Emmys acceptance speech, Cooper addressed how he pushed past his nerves to try something new: “If you’re listening, you’re focusing, you just step out of your comfort zone a little bit — who cares if you get embarrassed? Anything can be possible.”
His buzzy introduction has quickly led to another big opportunity: Next year, he’ll star as a young Heathcliff, alongside Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, in Emerald Fennell’s gothic drama “Wuthering Heights.”
Influencer
Gabby Windey
Polished yet messy, ditsy yet wise, Gabby Windey is the savvy embodiment of the pipeline from reality show to online curiosity to podcast host to everywhere celebrity.
It all began in 2022 with her first onscreen foray on “The Bachelor,” which she immediately parlayed into the titular role on “The Bachelorette” and a casting on “Dancing With the Stars,” in which she finished second. But it was this year, with her winning run on “The Traitors,” that Windey — who draws comparisons to Jennifer Coolidge — solidified her place as a pop culture darling.
On her podcast, “Long Winded,” she’s managed to make circuitous, poetic monologues highly meme-able. When she married the comedian Robby Hoffman, who earned an Emmy nod this year for her guest role on “Hacks,” fans rejoiced.
Next year, Windey, 34, will try her hand at hosting for Hulu’s dating show “Love Overboard,” produced by Alex Cooper.
Even before entering entertainment, Windey had many sides: She was an I.C.U. nurse in Colorado for years as well as an N.F.L. cheerleader for the Denver Broncos.
“I’m always an underdog,” she told The Cut this summer. “People underestimate me, but there’s a lot going on upstairs.”
Movies
Chase Infiniti
“You couldn’t have told me three years ago that I would be where I am now,” Chase Infiniti recently told Deadline about performing alongside Hollywood heavyweights like Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor in the Oscar front-runner “One Battle After Another.”
It was Infiniti’s film debut, and what a doozy: She plays Willa Ferguson, the determined, undaunted daughter of two former revolutionaries, Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Taylor). The role earned Infiniti, 25, a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actress this month.
Infiniti, who was born and raised in Indianapolis, has been pursuing performance for as long as she can remember, and earned a musical theater degree from Columbia College Chicago.
“I never wanted to do anything else,” she said. Even her name is derived from cinema: Chase, after Nicole Kidman’s character Chase Meridian in “Batman Forever,” and Infinti, her middle name that she uses as her surname professionally, after a memorable catchphrase from “Toy Story.”
Next, she will star in “The Testaments,” a sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu that’s set to premiere in April 2026; and after that, in the coming-of-age drama “The Julia Set” alongside Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
Comedy
Josh Johnson
In a world awash in short-form online snippets, Josh Johnson has found success by going against the grain.
The 35-year-old Louisiana-born comic, who has long pounded the comedy club pavement with his signature style that explores touchy issues in surprising ways, has managed to cultivate an audience of millions by giving them more.
Johnson releases scores of political and social comedy routines online — bits, so to speak, that can last between 15 minutes and an hour. His early viral hit, “Catfishing the KKK,” from 2017, about a brief online friendship with a white supremacist, has 13 million views on YouTube.
That same year he joined “The Daily Show” as a writer. And in 2024, he was made a correspondent.
But this year, Johnson succeeded where many others before have failed: He translated his online popularity to a traditional form when he anchored “The Daily Show” for the first time in July, breaking records for the show. That episode was the most-watched of the year not anchored by Jon Stewart, according to Nielsen.
“I think he goes through the world with authentic, natural curiosity,” Stewart told The Times in April. “He also has, though, the craft to be able to translate that natural curiosity and authenticity into real, viable content.”
Dance
Robbie Blue
Even if you didn’t spot Robbie Blue dancing alongside Lady Gaga in the “Abracadabra” music video (or alongside Taylor Swift or Charli XCX in recent years), there’s a good chance you saw his artistry this year.
His choreography on the Grammys stage in February for Doechii’s performance was “three minutes of bliss, and the performance of the night,” as our dance critic Gia Kourlas put it. With arms winding and backs bending, it was a work that catapulted Blue’s career and earned him an Emmy for choreography.
Only 25, Blue has already honed in on a flavor of dance so distinct — what Kourlas called “saucy yet slyly sophisticated” and “snapshots of a generation” — that once you pick up on it, you’ll recognize it elsewhere.
Just look to the dancers’ hands, for one thing, which he choreographs with as much thought as any other body part: whether in Doechii’s video for “Anxiety,” which is up for a best video Grammy in 2026 (it won him a MTV Video Music Award for best choreography in September); FKA twigs’s video for “Childlike Things”; or even in the girl group Katseye’s viral Gap ad.
“It’s really a wild thing,” he said of the nonstop demand since the Grammys. “The best word I can use is surrender. I just surrendered my obsession with this craft.”
Pop Music
Olivia Dean
Olivia Dean, 26, has been releasing music since she was 19, but “there’s been lots of hurdles,” she told The New York Times in October.
In large part, that’s because her sound is as diverse as her background: She was born in London to a Guyanese-Jamaican mother and an English father, and her style blends R&B, pop-soul and Motown with hint of jazz and occasionally a steel drum. (Her middle name is Lauryn, after Lauryn Hill.)
That stick-to-itiveness paid off in spades in 2025: Her new album, “The Art of Loving,” shot to the top of the album chart in Britain, where its single “Man I Need” hit No. 1. It was the biggest opening week for a British female artist since Adele’s “30” in 2021.
In November, she made her biggest splash in the U.S. with an appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” shortly before opening for Sabrina Carpenter for five nights at Madison Square Garden; Dean will headline her own show there next summer. And in February she’s up for the best new artist Grammy.
“All of a sudden, everybody’s looking at me,” Dean said. “It’s amazing, but it’s also so, so funny.”
Podcast
Amy Poehler
Amy Poehler, breakout star? She’s a household name who has accomplished plenty during her decades-long career as an actress and comedian — including a celebrated run on “Saturday Night Live,” leading the beloved sitcom “Parks and Recreation” and lending her voice to the “Inside Out” blockbusters as Joy.
But this year, Poehler, 54, proved she has more tricks up her sleeve. With her new podcast, “Good Hang With Amy Poehler,” she was able to shake the manosphere’s chokehold on the interview-type podcast, dethroning Joe Rogan from the top spot on Spotify the week her show debuted in March. With 40 episodes since, she’s now on Spotify’s top 10 podcasts of the year list and was Apple’s top new podcast of 2025.
The formula is simple but has still managed to reinvigorate the celebrity podcast by serving as an antidote to the noise and delivering on its promise: a laid-back but lively chat with friends from across the pop culture spectrum. Her guests — like Tina Fey, Idris Elba, Ina Garten and Adam Scott — have little to prove but plenty to share.
Fine Art
Ayoung Kim
In Ayoung Kim’s “Delivery Dancer” series, scenes that feel straight from the future blast to life — expect they are actually scenes from the present or, more accurately, the near past.
Leveraging video game engines, live-action footage, motion-capture technology and artificial intelligence, Kim, 46, offers a sensory experience — part lightning-fast videos, part evocative sculptures — inspired by the urban delivery workers who practically owned the near-empty streets of Seoul during the pandemic.
The result is a surprisingly fun, dizzying and thought-provoking exhibition — a rumination on labor, identity and the current phase of the tech age — that has been wowing visitors at MoMA PS1 in New York, where it will be on display through mid-March.
Kim, who lives and works in Seoul, has been making videos for over a decade. And the works that make up this series have been making the rounds from Frieze London to the Tate in London to the M+ museum in Hong Kong and the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin, gaining acclaim along the way.
Theater
Jasmine Amy Rogers
Nabbing the title role for a Broadway debut might be enough to land anyone on this list, but becoming a Tony nominee for the role is a next-level triumph. That’s exactly the kind of year Jasmine Amy Rogers has had, earning a best leading actress in a musical nomination for playing the Jazz Age cartoon character Betty Boop in “Boop! The Musical.”
Rogers, 26, who was born in Massachusetts, was a theater kid extraordinaire. In 2017, she was a finalist at the Jimmy Awards, which honor outstanding high school musical-theater performers. She then made the pilgrimage to New York and attended the Manhattan School of Music, although, feeling stagnant, she dropped out after two years.
Soon after, Jerry Mitchell — who’d go on to choreograph and direct “Boop!” — cast her in the musical “Becoming Nancy,” and from there, she joined the “Mean Girls” tour as Gretchen Wieners. Then, Mitchell came knocking again.
Now, she can be seen starring in the Off Broadway revival of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” a show our critic called “tender, joyous, bittersweet and very, very funny.”
Classical
Xabier Anduaga
When the Spanish tenor Xabier Anduaga made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 2023, in “L’elisir d’amore,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, was “blown away,” Gelb recalled in October to The Associated Press. “I’m not saying he’s the next Pavarotti — but he could be.”
Anduaga, 30, who started singing as a child in his hometown, San Sebastián, Spain, is already a bona fide star in Europe. Now after his performances in Rolando Villazón’s production of “La Sonnambula” for the Met this fall, he has staked a claim in the United States. “His tenor flows in endless legato, capable of thinning to a silken thread or blooming into ringing, plush fortissimos,” our critic wrote.
While he is not expected to return to the Met until the 2028-29 season, as Duke in “Rigoletto” and Romeo in “Romeo et Juliette” — “we have been actually having trouble booking him because he’s so much in demand,” Gelb said — Anduaga will tackle the title role in “Werther” at Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona in May, among other roles and performances across Europe.
As for the comparison to Pavarotti, “I don’t like ‘new this’ or ‘new that,” Anduaga told The A.P. “I try to do my best. So let’s just say, it’s me — I’m the new me.”
Videos by Ryan James Caruthers for The New York Times (Chase Infiniti); OK McCausland for The New York Times (Robbie Blue); Damien Maloney for The New York Times (Olivia Dean); Dana Golan for The New York Times (Jasmine Amy Rogers)
Maya Salam is an editor and reporter, focusing primarily on pop culture across genres.
The post The Breakout Stars of 2025 appeared first on New York Times.
