The Actresses of The Favourite (Screentime)

yeah, beyond the intellectual arguments for all of them being lead, it would never feel right to me to relegate to supporting roles that make up nearly half a modest two-hour runtime, especially when they're all present throughout and at the film's most important junctures and in the general absence of other characters. This movie really doesn't have a large cast. The only ones driving anything or filling the screentime are the three ladies at its center.

Contrast that with something like Streep in Ironweed who I will always contend is a supporting role despite having a significant portion of screentime. One thing to consider though is that that's a longer film and Streep's character is virtually absent from the final 40 minutes of it as the film refocuses exclusively on Nicholson's relationship with his family and his haunted past. For that reason I'm convinced that if the role had been given to a relative first-timer instead of an established star at the top of her game, TriStar would have pushed the performance in supporting (although that's a different discussion for a different day).

None of that can be said for the ladies in The Favourite who collectively drive the plot in ebbs and flows from the film's first frame. I'm fine with anyone making the case that Stone or is "more" lead than Weisz of Colman (or however you want to read it) and I'm a proponent of that kind of thinking because the same can be said of supporting roles (they're not all of equal supportive significance), although part of it's a gut thing. I think there can be degrees of "lead-ness" (Cold War is an example of that IMO) but whereas a role like Nicholas Hoult feels is obviously supporting to me because he's in the background for most of the film and Lanthimos never frames the story within his perspective, Colman and Weisz are both driving forces in this story and Lanthimos dedicates much of screentime to their perspectives and motivations, which would be less of a factor if the film had been three hours and their screentime had remained the same. If that had been the case yeah quite possibly they'd be supporting, but it's not the case, and I've said it before and I'll beat that dead horse again--this movie is about a triangle of shifting power dynamic between three women, and no single point in a triangle can ever be less significant than the other two when the entire film is focused on what goes on inside that triangle from all three (I repeat, ALL THREE) perspectives. Their respective screentimes within the overall runtime reflects that.

They're all co-lead. That's the easiest most common sense assessment. Maybe Stone is more lead than the others, but they're all lead. Any other interpretation feels viscerally and acutely wrong to me.