Danai Gurira

Danai Gurira writes as well as she acts, and for a while the writing was ahead. Born in Iowa to Zimbabwean parents and raised between the two countries, she trained for the stage, and her play Eclipsed reached Broadway and drew a Tony nomination for Best Play. Her first significant screen role, in The Visitor in 2008, was a small one built almost entirely on watchfulness.

Michonne changed the scale. Arriving in The Walking Dead as a hooded stranger with a sword, she took a character who began as a genre icon and gradually made her the most emotionally legible person on a show with a very high attrition rate. It is a decade-long performance, extended into The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, which Gurira also wrote on, and it is where you can watch her do the most.

Okoye in the Marvel films is a narrower part played with enormous precision. Her entire conflict is loyalty, to a throne and to a person, and Gurira gets more from a still face and a spear than the material strictly requires. Those films are the reason her work has grossed nearly seven billion dollars, a figure the record books count as the seventh highest of any actress. The playwriting has continued alongside all of it, which is the part of her career the box office totals tend to bury.