Golden Globes 2017: Lena Headey, Lauren Cohan, Chrissy Metz, Kathy Bates top Supporting Actress picks

We’ve officially made it, everyone! We’ve arrived today to the final edition of our Golden Globes Preview Series, or at least the part of it where we spotlight our own personal picks for nominees. We’ll still have the result of the reader vote a little bit later on down the road on December 1, and to go along with that, there is also still to come the actual nominees being announced on December 12. At some point between then and the start of the actual Globes on January 8, we’ll more than likely be looking at much of this field further.

In closing off our category previews today, we’re talking a one here in Best Supporting Actress which is certainly one of the more complicated ones that you’re going to find, if for no other reason than that you’re looking at a multitude of different genres, and a field that in general really deserves to be split up. (Who hasn’t the Hollywood Foreign Press done that already?) Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen here to the detriment of everyone who’s going to be snubbed on our list. We know we’re being redundant in mentioning once more the abundance of great people from top to bottom, but it’s so true and there are such a wide array of quality people to choose from.

Best Supporting Actress

Kathy Bates, “American Horror Story: Roanoke” (FX) – While we’re not going to attest to “Roanoke” being a perfect season, we will state that it is a far superior overall product than the two or three seasons that came before it … with Bates’ performance as the Butcher / deranged actress Agnes being a huge part of the reason why. This is Bates at her best, milking every second of screen time and alternating between being reasonably-kind and relatable to utterly terrifying and dangerous.

Lauren Cohan, “The Walking Dead” (AMC) – We knew that there would be a vast amount of heartache in Cohan’s performance of Maggie, given all that she went through before before the season 6 finale and also what transpired afterward. Yet, at the same time there’s also been a source of strength and inspiration there, as we’ve had a chance to look further at the full extent of her journey, and precisely how far she’s come from the character she was back when we first got to know her during the Hershel’s Farm era. Cohan’s work has always been ot a certain degree underrated, and we hope that this marks more of an opportunity for her to walk into the spotlight.

Lena Headey, “Game of Thrones” (HBO) – “The Winds of Winter” was a tour de force for Headey, a woman who was probably deserving of this nomination even before before that for playing Cersei Lannister in the midst of an epic, violent, and world-shattering revenge tour. This is a woman who’s experienced tremendous pain, but there is something within her that wants to enforce that pain on others rather than ensure no one ever suffers like she has. Headey makes this character into the sort of villain we want to have onscreen, even if we know she’s terrible and not the sort of person we’d ever want to spend any considerable amount of time with.

Chrissy Metz, “This Is Us” (NBC) – You could really nominate almost anyone from the cast onto the Globes list this year, given that they’re all putting in such fantastic, humanizing performances of people at various stages of their lives. What we love about Metz is how, even within the first eight or so episodes, she brings you so many different dimensions to Kate. You see her fears, her insecurities, her drive to get better, and the care that she does have for other people in her family. She crafts who is effectively a real person in a fictional world better than almost anyone we’ve seen in the past year, and she does it in an incredibly short span of time given where we are in the season.

Rhea Seehorn, “Better Call Saul” (AMC) – Season 2 of “Better Call Saul” was really our biggest opportunity to date to learn more about the character of Kim Wexler, and as a result of that, how fantastic she is. She’s smart, savvy, driven, and yet she sees something within Jimmy McGill that inspires her in a way that she’s not familiar with. Seehorn plays this struggle beautifully, since she recognizes precisely how shady this man can be, but at the same time admires his mind and realizes his potential. She’s an ally at times, a challenger at others, and without her, we’re not sure we’d ever get to the hart of a man who eventually becomes Saul Goodman.