Jena Malone

Jena Malone was born in Sparks, Nevada in 1984 and grew up there and in Las Vegas while her mother acted in local theatre. Watching that is what made her want to do it, and she talked her mother into moving them to Los Angeles so she could try. It worked almost immediately: she was cast in the television film Bastard Out of Carolina in 1996, which brought Independent Spirit and Screen Actors Guild nominations, then Hope in 1997, which brought a Golden Globe nomination, then Contact and Stepmom, with a Saturn Award for the first. That is four significant credits and three award nominations before she was fifteen.

What she did next is the unusual part. Child actors who arrive that loudly generally get funnelled into leads; Malone spent the following twenty-five years choosing difficult small films instead. Donnie Darko, Saved!, The United States of Leland, Lovesong, Consecration, Swallowed: the pattern is a preference for material that is uncomfortable, unglamorous or plainly strange, and a willingness to take a supporting role in it.

Her one franchise is the exception that clarifies the rest. As Johanna Mason across three Hunger Games films she plays open contempt, for the games, the cameras and the audience, and she is the only person in that series who seems to be enjoying herself. The auteur run that followed suits her better still: Paul Thomas Anderson, Nicolas Winding Refn and Tom Ford all cast her for a specific quality of unsettling directness, and she gives each of them something different. She works constantly and is almost never the reason a film is being sold, which is a strange fate for someone this good.