Colby Minifie
Colby Minifie is an actor, born 1992.
Colby Minifie plays panic better than almost anyone currently working in American television, and she has built a career out of it. Her earliest credit here is a small part in a 2009 film; the run that matters starts in 2015 with Robyn in the first season of Jessica Jones, a needling, unwanted neighbour written to be irritating and played just past the point of comfort.
Ashley Barrett on The Boys is the role. She is the executive whose job is to manage people who cannot be managed, and Minifie assembles the performance out of forced smiles, swallowed sentences and small physical collapses that happen a beat after the door closes. It is comic work that keeps sliding into something sadder, and the show has escalated it since 2019, through Gen V and the animated Diabolical.
Fear the Walking Dead used her differently across its fifth and sixth seasons. Virginia is quiet, certain and unhurried, which is the proof that the panic is a choice rather than a default setting.
The film work is scattered and mostly independent: Yvonne in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Doris in Radium Girls, parts in Don't Think Twice, Submission and The Surrender. None of it has yet handed her a lead the size of Ashley.
Movies (7)
TV (5)
Where to start with Colby Minifie
Watch The Boys for Ashley as much as for the premise. She is the only character in it whose unravelling is played for laughs and pity at the same time, and the joke gets more uncomfortable every season.
Gen V continues the same performance in a different building and is tighter than its parent show. The Boys Presents: Diabolical is a short animated detour with her voice in it, worth a look.
For the range, Fear the Walking Dead in its fifth and sixth seasons gives her the opposite register, calm and immovable, and Marvel's Jessica Jones shows the early version of the nervous energy. I'm Thinking of Ending Things is the strangest thing on her resume and the best film, though her part is small. Radium Girls is a modest historical drama she is very good in.