Kristen Schaal

Schaal came up through stand-up and sketch, and her first sustained television role was Mel in Flight of the Conchords, a superfan whose devotion to a two-man band plays as a genuine security problem. That part set the terms for the next twenty years: the voice arrives before the character does, and then the character turns out to be stranger than the voice suggested.

The instrument is a high, flat, childlike register that sounds harmless. What she does with it is put unnerving conviction underneath. Louise Belcher in Bob's Burgers is a nine-year-old running long-term schemes with the composure of a small crime boss. Mabel Pines in Gravity Falls is the opposite trick, total sincerity with no protective irony, which is far harder to sustain across a serialised mystery. Hazel Wassername on 30 Rock and The Guide in What We Do in the Shadows both live in the gap between how she sounds and what she is willing to say out loud.

Her best dramatic work is also voice work. As Sarah Lynn in BoJack Horseman she used that same helium register for a former child star, and it brought a Primetime Emmy nomination for character voice-over. Elsewhere she is one of the most reliable animated comic actors working: Trixie in the Toy Story films, Carol Pilbasian across The Last Man on Earth, and a long run of features from Despicable Me 2 to The Bob's Burgers Movie. Very few performers have built a career this specific out of one vocal quirk without ever becoming only the quirk.