Gillian Jacobs

Gillian Jacobs trained the long way round. She grew up in Pittsburgh, started acting classes at eight, worked with the Pittsburgh Public Theater as a teenager and went from Mt. Lebanon High School straight to Juilliard, which is a conservatory pedigree almost nobody brings to a network sitcom about a community college study group.

Community used it strangely well. Britta Perry begins as the love interest and the straight woman, and then the writing discovers that Jacobs is funnier when Britta is wrong, so the show spends six years making her the most confidently incorrect person in the room. Playing that without quietly begging the audience to keep liking you is harder than it looks, and it is the thing she is best at: people whose self-image runs about a foot ahead of their competence, held just the right side of contempt.

Love, on Netflix, was the argument that she could do it at drama length. Mickey Dobbs is the same gap between intention and behaviour with the jokes removed, and Jacobs plays her without asking for sympathy. Around it sits a run of small films that suit her better than the studio comedies do: Don't Think Twice, Life Partners, I Used to Go Here. She has built a real voice career alongside it, most visibly as Atom Eve in Invincible, and she now turns up as Tiffany in The Bear, where a handful of scenes carry most of that show's argument about what the job costs the people waiting at home.