Laura Vandervoort
Laura Vandervoort is an actor, born 1984.
Canadian genre television has its own star system, and Vandervoort sits near the top of it. She started as a child actor on the Goosebumps series in the 1990s, did the standard Toronto apprenticeship of family films and guest spots, and landed a real teenage role as Sadie Harrison on Instant Star in 2004.
Smallville made her recognizable. Playing Kara Zor-El on a series built around a Superman who was not yet Superman was a strange assignment, and it did what those parts do: it welded her to science fiction for the following decade. V followed in 2009, where Lisa gave her something genuinely difficult, a character who has to be plausible as both an innocent and a threat while the audience watches for the seams.
Bitten in 2014 is the one to make the case with. Adapted from Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld novels, it gave her Elena Michaels and a lead role with actual physicality and appetite in it, and it is by some distance the most she has ever been asked to do. She also played Arla Cogan on Haven, which this catalog does not carry. The film work is mostly horror, and she is a reliably good horror lead: the remake of Rabid, Jigsaw, See for Me, Trigger Point. The pattern is a career of shows that ended before their audiences were done with them, which is a very particular kind of working life, and she has been better than most of the material handed to her.
Movies (14)
TV (12)
Where to start with Laura Vandervoort
Fans arrive through Smallville and should leave through Bitten. The Kara episodes are the reason most people know the name, but Elena Michaels is the role that gives her a whole show to hold, plus physical work most television leads never get near.
In between, V is the best-cast thing she has done, a remake with a genuinely unsettling premise and a part that runs on ambiguity. For the horror, Rabid is the ambitious one, a remake that commits to body horror rather than hedging, and See for Me is the tight little thriller that works better than its budget suggests. Jigsaw is franchise duty. Instant Star and Ted are the outliers, one teen drama and one very brief comic appearance.