Laura Donnelly
Laura Donnelly is an actor, born 1982.
The best of her work is not on screen. Donnelly, from Belfast and born in 1982, has built a career around the plays of Jez Butterworth: The River in the West End and on Broadway, then The Ferryman, then The Hills of California. She won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress for The Ferryman and was nominated for the Tony; The Hills of California brought her the Drama Desk Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award, along with further Olivier and Tony nominations. Screen actors do not usually have a theatre record that heavy.
What cameras get is composure with something violent underneath. The Nevers is the fullest use of it, casting her as Amalia True, who leads a group of women with inexplicable abilities through a Victorian London that would rather they did not exist, and who runs on a temper she can barely govern. Werewolf by Night hands her Elsa Bloodstone and lets her play an inherited monster-hunting dynasty as an irritation rather than a destiny, which is much funnier and much smarter than the material required.
The rest is a solid character ledger. She has an early role in The Fall that the entire series proceeds from, Emma O'Reilly in the cycling drama The Program, Mabel Tolkien in Tolkien, Charlotte Fischer in Sugar, Hella in Britannia, Abby in Dread, adapted from Clive Barker, and early British television in Hex, Sugar Rush and Missing. The Irish and Northern Irish parts keep finding her, which is fair enough given where her best writing has come from.
Movies (4)
TV (8)
Where to start with Laura Donnelly
For an actual lead role, go to The Nevers. Amalia True carries the show, and Donnelly plays her as somebody permanently one bad sentence away from violence, which makes the quiet scenes work far better than the premise deserves.
For the short, hard version of what she does, The Fall uses her briefly and the series never stops referring back to it. Werewolf by Night is a fifty-minute black-and-white Marvel special and the most purely enjoyable thing on this list.
From there, The Program gives her the most grounded part she has had on film, a woman on the losing side of a very one-sided fight. Britannia and Sugar are the genre and the noir options respectively, and Tolkien casts her as a mother in a biopic that is politer than she is. Her stage work with Jez Butterworth, which is where the awards are, is not among the credits listed here.