Erin Moriarty

Erin Moriarty was doing solid television work as a teenager, on Red Widow and in the first season of True Detective, before Marvel's Jessica Jones gave her Hope Shlottman in 2015. That part is a good early test case: a young woman whose account of her own life nobody quite accepts, played without any of the pleading that usually comes with victim roles.

The indie films around it fill in the rest. She is Kelly in The Kings of Summer, the girl who complicates the boys' summer, and Claire in Captain Fantastic, and she is Lydia in Blood Father, where she has to hold her own opposite an actor doing very loud work. All three are variations on a specific type: a teenager who is more competent than the adults will admit.

Then The Boys took over her career from 2019 onwards. Annie January, Starlight, is the most difficult assignment on that show, because she has to play sincerity in a series whose entire comic engine is contempt for sincerity. It only works if the audience believes she means it, and if it does not work, the satire around her collapses. She holds it for the run. The trade-off is that the show ate most of a decade of her time and her film credits stayed thin around it. What she does after it finishes is the genuinely open question on this page.