small role

During Oscar season, The Envelope also likes to celebrate actors in roles that might not otherwise garner awards attention. You can sense a whole life behind these portrayals; they draw you in and make you want to know more.

April Grace as Sister Rochelle, ‘One Battle After Another’

Amid the controlled chaos that is Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” young Willa (Chase Infiniti) is brought to a nunnery that used to be part of her parents’ revolutionary group French 75. What Willa doesn’t know is that her mother (Teyana Taylor) betrayed the group in order to save herself from prison, and is still alive.

Sister Rochelle, played by April Grace with seething intensity, sets her straight. “Your mother was a rat, and that makes you a baby rat,” she spits, and Willa’s world crumbles further.

Grace will be familiar to eagle-eyed PTA fans; in “Magnolia,” she played Gwenovier, the reporter who calmly destroyed Tom Cruise’s character. When the offer of Sister Rochelle came, “I didn’t need to look at the role, I trust Paul implicitly,” she says. “He is there for the actor, whatever you need.”

Grace has worked in film and television for over 30 years, “but I started out in theater, so character development is really important to me.” She created a backstory for Sister Rochelle, building up the reasons she was so hostile to Willa. “Sister Rochelle is all about community, and you don’t betray your community.”

Of Infiniti, Grace notes, “She was just lovely, and she made my job really easy, just looking at her” trying to act tough, “like you don’t even know you’re a baby.”

Jacobi and Noah Jupe as Hamnet and Hamlet, ‘Hamnet’

(Dania Maxwell / For The Times)

Jacobi Jupe plays the title role in “Hamnet,” as the ill-fated son of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley). He was thrown into the deep end on his first day, when his father leaves the family for London. “I didn’t really know Paul, and I had to get so intimate and so upset but hold it together, and I was a bit nervous,” Jacobi recalls. “But Paul is such a lovely person, and I instantly trusted him, so it was really easy to do that scene.”

His big brother Noah adds, “And it’s what spurs on your entire character, the courage from that scene, so it’s a big thing to start with.”

It gets harder from there. Jacobi depended on his mother (actor Katy Cavanagh), Buckley and director and co-writer Chloé Zhao — “they were my three mums on that shoot” — to help him process his own death scene. “It was shocking, really, because I spent so long being Hamnet and feeling his emotions, and having to let him go was really hard.”

Noah was hired to play the actor playing Hamlet just before the part was to be shot. “That is an opportunity you cannot turn down,” he says, even though he only had a week to prepare the most famous soliloquies in the Western canon. “I learned the sword fight in eight hours.”

During rehearsals onstage, there was no Globe audience before him except for Buckley. “I just found myself performing to her, which then made all of the scenes I was doing like a conversation between me and Jessie.”

Zhao showed Noah his brother’s scenes so that his Hamlet would carry echoes of the lost child. “It was like watching yourself without all of the self-consciousness or the criticism,” he says of seeing Jacobi’s portrayal, “and just truly marveling at a performance by someone that is literally part of your heart.”

Hadley Robinson as Belle, ‘The History of Sound’

With one glance at Hadley Robinson’s Belle, you can feel the weight of the baby in her arms, the sorrow in her eyes, and the exhaustion in her soul. The film, directed by Oliver Hermanus and written by Ben Shattuck, centers on Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor), secret lovers who travel the American countryside to record folk music after World War I. After they part, Lionel writes David for years without hearing back, and finally travels to his home to see him again.

Unknown to him, David had married Belle, and died several years earlier. Lionel instead meets Belle, now remarried and with a baby.

In a powerful scene, Belle tells Lionel her own love story — meeting David, falling for him, losing him — fully aware that she’s talking about her great love to David’s great love. But her loneliness is so thorough, she’s almost grateful to have someone to share David with. Lionel barely speaks as he absorbs the information.

“It was absolutely a monologue,” says Robinson. “But I found that to be so much easier to prepare, because there was so much in there that the character couldn’t help but be specific, because I was given an exact template.” She journaled as Belle for a week before her one day on set. “I’ve never had a role that was that devastating before.”

Though Lionel says nothing, Robinson praises Mescal as a scene partner. “I have found listening to be extremely difficult, and the way Paul listens is like a superpower. He was so incredibly present in that room.” He stayed on set all day, even when he was offscreen, “and rehearsed with me as well. He really showed up in a way that not all actors do.”

Actor Mickey Rourke faces eviction from his Los Angeles home after failing to pay rent.

Rourke, whose birth name is Philip Andre Rourke Jr., received a three-day notice to pay rent or vacate the premises on Dec. 18 and had failed to comply, according to court documents filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday.

At the time of the notice, he owed $59,100 in unpaid rent.

A representative for Rourke did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In March, Rourke signed a lease for the three-bedroom, 2.5-bath house for $5,200 a month; it was subsequently raised to $7,000 a month, states the court filings.

A Zillow listing describes the property as a “nicely upgraded Spanish bungalow” built in 1926. Raymond Chandler was said to have resided there for two years in the 1940s.

The property’s owner, Eric Goldie, is requesting compensation for attorney‘s fees and for damages. A lawyer for Goldie was unavailable for comment.

A former boxer, Rourke, 73, turned to acting with small roles in the 1980 film “Heaven’s Gate” and “Body Heat” a year later, before earning acclaim for his role in 1982’s “Diner.”

After a slate of leading roles in a number of movies including “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” “9 1/2 Weeks” and “Rumble Fish,” Rourke‘s film career took a nosedive, with his off-screen antics frequently overshadowing his acting.

“I lost everything. My house, my wife, my credibility, my career,” he told The Times in an interview in 2008. “I just all had all this anger from my childhood, which was really shame, not anger, and used it as armor and machismo to cover up my wounds. Unfortunately, the way I acted really frightened people, although it was really just me who was scared. But I was like this person who was short-circuited and I didn’t know how to fix myself.”

In 2005 he reemerged with the neo-noir action thriller “Sin City.”

Three years later, Rourke’s portrayal of aging, washed up wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, in the Darren Aronofsky film “The Wrestler,” earned him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for lead actor.

Rourke’s return to the big screen has not been an entirely smooth ride.

In April, he agreed to exit “Celebrity Big Brother UK” after producers warned him over the use of “inappropriate language and instances of unacceptable behavior,” according to a statement a spokesperson for the show released at the time.

His remarks allegedly included comments about JoJo Siwa’s sexuality

Following his departure from the reality show, his manager announced that he was pursuing legal action over a pay dispute, claiming that the show had disrespected her client by “publicly embarrassing him” and declined to pay him, according to People.