by 2022 has found a number of high-profile actors getting involved in real-life dramas that are more gripping than their acting roles. While some reputations were tarnished, others were revived, and for many actors, the craft of acting remained in the background in the real life grand opera.
Compiled from millions of searches on Yahoo, these were the players you searched the most in the last 12 months.
10: Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise returned as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, the year he finally turned 60 after many delays caused by Covid.
Read more: The new best movies to be released in Christmas 2022
The sequel to his 1986 hit was well worth the wait and fetched £1.2 billion at the worldwide box office, giving Cruise the biggest hit of his career.
9: Michelle Keegan
Coronation Street and Our Girl star Michelle Keegan returns as the fiery Erin in the fourth series of Sky’s hit comedy series Brassic in 2022. , a new BBC drama.
8: Millie Bobby Brown
Millie Bobby Brown was the unofficial queen of Netflix in 2022 and returns as Eleven in the fourth series of the hit 1980s sci-fi series Stranger Things and as Sherlock’s younger sister in Enola Holmes 2. She celebrated her big day dressed as Barbie and Ken with her boyfriend, Jake Bongiovi.
7: Emma Watson
Emma Watson returns to our screens on New Year’s Eve 2022, but not in an acting role. She was part of Harry Potter’s private reunion, Back to Hogwarts, with Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint. Her last acting role came in 2019 in Little Women, but when Watson returns to her pixie haircut look, she remains one of the most loved headlines on the internet.
6: Daniel Craig
After leaving James Bond for good in 2021, Daniel Craig is living his best life in 2022. It’s Christmas time, and she’s also found time to break the internet with her dance moves in a new vodka ad.
5: David Jason
Best known for playing Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses, 82-year-old David Jason continues to live rent-free in the minds of most of the UK population.
Read more: David Jason says he moved away from Nicholas Lyndhust
With no major acting roles to speak of in 2022, a dangerous brush with Covid has kept him in the news this year, as Jason told BBC News “I got it seriously bad”.
4: Sylvester Stallone
Sylvester Stallone is in the midst of a renaissance. In 2022, he starred in Prime Video’s superhero drama Samaritan and made his prime TV debut, the leading gangster drama Tulsa King. But his busy diary came at a price, and he temporarily broke up with his wife, Jennifer Flavin, before reconciling in September.
3: Will Smith
Will Smith has won his first Oscar and a brand new movie has been released – Emancipation – but that’s not what the Fresh Prince star will be remembered for in 2022. slapping Chris Rock after he made a joke about his comic book wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. It was the most shocking moment of the year and will live on in memories for a long time.
2: I Heard Amber
Aquaman star Amber Heard was halfway through 2022’s most high-profile celebrity court case. She was sued by her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, in a multimillion-dollar US lawsuit that ruled that her 2018 article in The Washington Post in which she claimed she was the victim of sexual and physical abuse, was defamatory. After the decision, she said she was “heartbroken” but “even more disappointed with what this decision has meant for other women.”
1: Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp, the other half of the lawsuit, was awarded $10m (£8m) in compensatory damages, as well as $5m (£4m) in punitive damages. Fans have claimed the ambiguous decision as a moral victory for the actor, who is returning to acting and seen performing on stage with Jeff Beck.
Watch: The consequences of the Depp v Heard case continue
