Sarah Gadon

Sarah Gadon started on Canadian television as a child, guesting on Are You Afraid of the Dark? in 1999, Mutant X in 2002, Dark Oracle in 2004, with a Disney Channel part in Cadet Kelly and a parallel line in voice work, including Beth on Total Drama Island and the title role in Ruby Gloom. It is an unglamorous apprenticeship and it lasted a decade.

David Cronenberg is what changed it. She appeared in A Dangerous Method, Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars, plus Antiviral around the same time, and then Denis Villeneuve cast her in Enemy. Those films established what she is now used for, which is a composed and slightly unreal surface with something wrong behind it. Helen in Enemy, Elise Shifrin in Cosmopolis and Hannah Geist in Antiviral are all women who function as images rather than people, and Gadon plays the image deliberately, holding the stillness a beat past comfort.

Alias Grace in 2017 is where that becomes the entire subject. She narrates a story that the audience cannot verify, and the performance has to be legible and unreadable at once for six hours. It is by some distance the best thing she has done and the least seen. Around it she has taken period leads, Princess Elizabeth in A Royal Night Out, Lady Elizabeth Murray in Belle, Countess Ebba Sparre in The Girl King, and stranger small films such as Black Bear and Corner Office, alongside studio work in Dracula Untold and Ferrari.