Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#3738
of 909177 performers
Top 1%
Amir Talai works on versatility rather than volume, and the catalogue keeps proving that the quieter choice was the correct one.
The essay
Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.
Amir Talai appears in 9 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Amir. Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway is the clearest case: a film rated 8.3 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are versatility, quiet performance, transformation. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for music, tv movie, horror. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Joe DeMaio, Alejandro Brugués, Noah Baumbach and others, Amir Talai helped set a standard other performers now audition against. Awards bodies have been slower than the work, which is usually the sign of a career built on choices rather than campaigns.
Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway (2025) as Self · The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) as Clerk · Marriage Story (2019) as Amir
Career snapshot
Ranked #3738 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
9
2003–2025
Career length
22 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
8.3
Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway
Average Nutevio score
6.5
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
8.3
Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway
Most frequent director
Joe DeMaio
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Joe DeMaio
Most common genre
Drama
5 titles
Average runtime
1h 36m
Across catalogue work
Golden Globe wins
—
Unknown
Nutevio metric
Ten weighted categories, applied identically to everyone we cover.
Nutevio Performer Score
6.8
out of 10
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio metric
Cultural impact and legacy, measured separately from craft — how far the work travelled once it left the cinema.
Nutevio Influence Score
6.4
out of 10
A quieter influence — felt inside the films rather than across the industry.
How far the work travelled past the people who saw it first.
What survives once the release-week conversation has burned off.
Institutional acknowledgement, weighted but never decisive.
Years of chosen, relevant work rather than years merely employed.
Statuettes, read as evidence rather than verdict.
Roles named without needing the film named alongside them.
Directors who wrote parts because this performer existed.
The reading other performers now have to answer.
Actor DNA
A fingerprint derived from the roles themselves — register, range and the kind of film they carry.
The shape of a career
Every performance plotted in time. Hover a point to read the title behind it.
Peak years
Where the scores, the awards and the sheer volume of work agree with each other.
Best decade
2020s
7.1 average MV
The 2020s are where the work and the material meet. Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway, Pooka Lives! — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
2020s
7.1
Across 2 catalogue films in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
2020s
7.1
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
2000s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. The Pursuit of Happyness, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde.
Most productive era
2010s
5 films
The busiest stretch of the catalogue — volume that reads as appetite rather than availability.
Range, mapped
Genres down the side, decades across the top. Warmer cells mean stronger titles.
| Genre | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drama | 8.01 film | 6.44 films | — |
| Action | — | 4.81 film | — |
| Thriller | — | 5.51 film | 5.81 film |
| Comedy | 5.71 film | 5.73 films | — |
| Romance | 5.71 film | 6.01 film | — |
| Horror | — | — | 5.81 film |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio
2003Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Associate.
Highest rated performance · Career peak · Most recent film
2025Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway
8.3 on the Nutevio scale, the top of the catalogue for this performer. Weighing billing against the film's own quality, this is the point where everything aligned at once. The current state of the argument, as Self.
Our order
Every performance in the catalogue, ordered by Nutevio Score.
Every title
Filter by genre or decade, and compare any two titles side by side.
9 of 9 films
as Amir
Directed by Alejandro Brugués
as Matt
Directed by James Ponsoldt
From the library
Every movie and TV credit stored for this name in the Nutevio catalogue — filter by media, role or sort by rating.
Loading credits…
The defining work
#1
Self
Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway (2025)
Performance score8.5
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Self gives Amir Talai a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Clerk
The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
Performance score7.8
The Pursuit of Happyness asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Clerk is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Amir
Marriage Story (2019)
Performance score7.5
Marriage Story asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Amir is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Amir
Pooka Lives! (2020)
Performance score6.5
Pooka Lives! asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Amir is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movieStart here
A guided path through the work, ordered so each film explains the next.
Best entry point
as Self
Start here. Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway is the clearest statement of what Amir Talai does — accessible, 46 minutes, and rated 8.3 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Amir at the most legible performance, then move forward in time so each film reads as a response to the one before it rather than a repetition of it.
The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
A deliberate change of key after Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
The Circle (2017)
Keeps the drama register of The Pursuit of Happyness but asks for a colder reading of it.
Marriage Story (2019)
Keeps the drama register of The Circle but asks for a colder reading of it.
Pooka Lives! (2020)
A deliberate change of key after Marriage Story — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Gabriele Muccino
Director
1 film together
Notably The Pursuit of Happyness
Kirk Jones
Director
1 film together
Notably What to Expect When You're Expecting
Paul Weitz
Director
1 film together
Notably Grandma
Taran Killam
Director
1 film together
Notably Killing Gunther
James Ponsoldt
Director
1 film together
Notably The Circle
Noah Baumbach
Director
1 film together
Notably Marriage Story
Alejandro Brugués
Director
1 film together
Notably Pooka Lives!
Joe DeMaio
Director
1 film together
Notably Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Joe DeMaio
Director
1 film together · 8.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Hazbin Hotel: Live on BroadwayGabriele Muccino
Director
1 film together · 8.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
The Pursuit of HappynessNoah Baumbach
Director
1 film together · 7.7 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Marriage StoryPaul Weitz
Director
1 film together · 6.4 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
GrandmaKirk Jones
Director
1 film together · 6.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
What to Expect When You're ExpectingAlejandro Brugués
Director
1 film together · 5.8 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Pooka Lives!James Ponsoldt
Director
1 film together · 5.5 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
The CircleTaran Killam
Director
1 film together · 4.8 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Killing GuntherSix degrees
Follow the thread outward — director, film, co-star, and the film after that.
Categories of our own
Six editorial categories we apply to every performer we cover.
Most rewatchable
The Pursuit of Happyness
as Clerk
The one that survives a fourth viewing. Nothing in the performance depends on surprise, which is why it keeps paying out.
Most emotional performance
What to Expect When You're Expecting
as Patel
Grief played at conversational volume. The film never asks the audience to cry; the performance simply makes it difficult not to.
Most influential performance
Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway
as Self
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
Marriage Story
as Amir
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway
as Self
If the career had to be argued in a single scene, our editors would pick one from this film and rest the case.
In their films' words
“You can build a whole film around a performer who knows when not to speak. Amir Talai has known it for a long time.”
Head to head
Put two careers on the same scale and see where the argument actually sits.
Ours alone
Recognitions handed out by this desk, on criteria no awards body uses.
Career Achievement
Awarded
22 years of relevant work — not merely a long career, but a long career of choices.
Modern Classic Performer
Awarded
Defining performances delivered inside the last twenty-five years, in films already being taught rather than merely remembered.
Drama Legend
Awarded
5 catalogue titles in drama, each one a reference point for the films that followed.
Our desk
Best ending, best opening, best twist and the rest — categories we apply to everyone we cover.
Best ending
Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway
as Self
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway
as Self
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
What to Expect When You're Expecting
as Patel
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Pooka Lives!
as Amir
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Hazbin Hotel: Live on Broadway
as Self
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Killing Gunther
as Izzat "Crusher" Bukhari
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
What to Expect When You're Expecting
as Patel
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
The Pursuit of Happyness
as Clerk
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
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Have your say
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Reference
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