By Associated Press
Owen Cooper emphatically announced himself to the world in 2025. The “Adolescence” star became the youngest male winner in the actor category at the Emmy Awards. He was only 15 years old. It was his first professional job.
The young English actor’s triumphant debut was just one of many notable career turns that had the entertainment world talking this year.
“Severance” star Tramell Tillman also made Emmy history as the first black man to win as a supporting actor in a drama series, Chase Sui Wonders helped turn Seth Rogen’s “The Studio” into a delightful satire, and Danny Ramirez wowed in the second season of “The Last of Us.” Additionally, you couldn’t miss Arden Cho, who lent his voice to Rumi, star of the popular Netflix animated film “KPop Demon Hunters.”
All five reach late 2025 with critical and popular attention and have been named Breakthrough Artists of the Year by the Associated Press.
Few artists have had a year like Cho, a Korean-American who, as the lead character in “KPop Demon Hunters,” propelled that film to become Netflix’s most-watched film of all time and saw him score four top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including the No. 1 hit “Golden.”
“I feel like it was my golden moment,” Cho says.
Harvard-educated Wonders had two notable roles in 2025: playing Quinn Hackett, a comically manipulative creative director in “The Studio” and scream queen Ava Brucks in “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
“I feel incredibly lucky to be able to be on set with all my friends, telling a lot of jokes and being weird on screen,” she says.
Ramirez, known for playing Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – the first Latin Avenger – and Lt. Mickey “Fanboy” García opposite Tom Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick,” had a memorable turn as the vengeful member of the group that hunted our favorite characters in the hellscape of “The Last of Us.”
“Overall, it’s been incredibly fruitful creatively,” the actor says. “I was in some incredible productions. I got to see the world. It was a dream.”
Cruise also taps another groundbreaking AP performer – Tillman, who starred in one of the year’s biggest hits, “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” – and also enjoyed a stellar second season as Seth Milchick in “Severance,” capped by a finale in which he led a fully choreographed marching band.
“It’s been a pretty remarkable year,” he said. “I want to continue to develop and tell more stories, stories that we haven’t heard and stories that tell the same story but from a different perspective.”
It’s also something Cooper, now 16, is hoping for after a 2025 that saw him crowned Hollywood’s newest star.
“I just want to do everything,” he says.
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For more information about AP’s 2025 Breakthrough Artists class, visit https://apnews.com/hub/ap-breakthrough-entertainers
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This story was translated from English by an AP editor using a generative artificial intelligence tool.
