Lauren Lee Smith
Lauren Lee Smith is an actor, born 1980.
Canadian television has handed Lauren Lee Smith something the American industry rarely hands anyone: two decades of leading roles, one after another. Emma DeLauro on Mutant X from 2001, Lara Perkins on The L Word, Riley Adams on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Sergeant Michelle McCluskey on The Listener, and the title character on Frankie Drake Mysteries from 2017.
What she does is a flat, unimpressed delivery that reads as competence rather than coldness, which is why she keeps getting cast as investigators. It also means directors use her for a particular kind of unhappiness: her part in The Shape of Water is a study in brittle domestic politeness, and she plays it without once asking for sympathy.
The film work is more varied than the television suggests. She starred in Lie with Me in 2005, a sexually explicit Canadian drama that would have finished a more cautious career, then Danielle in Trick 'r Treat, Juliette Bath in Pathology, Lisa in The Last Kiss, Willow in If I Stay, a beat girl in Art School Confidential, Heather in How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town.
Twenty-three credits, split almost evenly between film and television. The television half is where she has been given a whole person to play, and it shows.
Movies (12)
TV (11)
Where to start with Lauren Lee Smith
Lead roles are the point here, so Frankie Drake Mysteries is the place to start: a CBC period detective series in which she is the title character and the tone sits somewhere between charm and procedural. It is the only thing in her catalogue built entirely around her.
The Listener is the other long-form option and the better-written one, a Canadian genre series where she plays the police side of the story and does the heavy lifting on plausibility.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is the widest-seen credit, though joining a long-running procedural as a new investigator is a thankless job and she gets a thankless amount out of it.
For film, Trick 'r Treat is the most rewatchable thing she is in, an anthology horror picture with a real cult following. The Shape of Water gives her a small part in a much better film than anything else on this list. Mutant X is where it started and has aged exactly as well as early-2000s syndicated science fiction ever does. This Life is the quiet drama for anyone who wants her without a badge.