Karen Gillan

Karen Gillan is a Scottish actress and filmmaker who came to attention playing Amy Pond, a primary companion to the Eleventh Doctor, on Doctor Who from 2010 to 2013. Her early film roles include the thriller Outcast (2010) and the romantic comedy Not Another Happy Ending (2013), and she has worked on the British stage, appearing in John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence in 2011.

Nebula is the most interesting fact about her career, and it is easy to underrate because of how the character looks. Gillan has played her across the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, two Avengers films, Thor: Love and Thunder and What If...?, mostly under heavy prosthetics with her head shaved, and given very little screen time in any single entry. Across the decade she has quietly become the most changed person in that franchise, starting as a snarling instrument of someone else's will and ending up doing deadpan comedy about her own damage. Those are small adjustments made over ten years in a role that was not designed to reward them.

Away from Marvel she keeps picking genre films with an idea in them rather than a budget: Oculus, Dual, Gunpowder Milkshake, In a Valley of Violence, The Life of Chuck. The commercial exception is the Jumanji pair, where the joke is that she is a shy teenage girl trapped inside an action-figure body, and she plays the mismatch straight, which is why it works. She has also moved behind the camera as a director, which suits someone with that much interest in odd material.