Laura Slade Wiggins
Laura Slade Wiggins is an actor, born 1988.
Laura Slade Wiggins got a hard part early. Karen Jackson on Shameless, from 2011, was written as a self-destructive teenager on a show with no interest in softening anybody, and Wiggins played her without any of the pleading for sympathy that kind of role usually attracts. She was a main cast member for the first two seasons and recurred in the third.
That is the peak, and it arrived first, which is an awkward career shape. What followed was network science fiction in consecutive years, The Tomorrow People in 2013 and Intelligence in 2014, neither of which came back for a second season, and then a long stretch of television films and small feature parts: Starving in Suburbia in 2014, the period ensemble 20th Century Women in 2016, Rings in 2017, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase in 2019.
There is a pattern in the casting. She keeps being hired to play the girl who is the problem, or the girl with the problem: an eating disorder film, a thriller about social media, a horror sequel. She is a musician too, which the acting credits do not show at all. On the evidence here, nobody has yet given her a second part as good as the first one, which reads as a comment on the industry rather than on her.
Movies (6)
TV (3)
Where to start with Laura Slade Wiggins
Shameless and specifically its first two seasons. Karen is one of the most uncomfortable characters in a show built entirely from discomfort, and Wiggins commits to her without hedging, which is the whole reason to watch her at all. If the Gallagher family is not for you, you will never reach her, so give it three episodes.
20th Century Women is the best-made film on this list by a distance, a warm, precise late-1970s ensemble, though her role in it is small. Starving in Suburbia is its opposite: a television issue movie with real problems as filmmaking, and the sole reason to seek it out is that she is the entire engine of it.
Otherwise, The Tomorrow People is watchable teen science fiction of its moment, Rings is a poor sequel with two or three good sequences, and Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase is a cheerful film for younger viewers. InstaPsycho is for the curious only.