Sarah Wayne Callies
Sarah Wayne Callies is an actor, born 1977.
Two enormous hit shows, a lead role in each, and a character both times that viewers spent years arguing about: that is an unusual shape for a career. Callies' earliest credit here is a 2003 Tarzan, an update that recast Jane Porter as a police officer, and the real break came two years later on Prison Break.
That show ran on countdown clocks and cliffhangers, which left Sara Tancredi carrying nearly all of its emotional weight, a thankless assignment on a series that would rather cut back to a tattoo diagram. She did it well enough that the franchise brought her back for the feature-length coda Prison Break: The Final Break. Lori Grimes on The Walking Dead was the harder job and the one people still fight about. Much of what audiences hated about Lori was structural, since the writing wanted a moral obstacle and a wife in the same body, and Callies played the friction instead of smoothing it away.
Since then she has mostly led her own series: Katie Bowman in the science-fiction drama Colony, Leann Volesky in the war drama The Long Road Home, Birdie Nicoletti in The Company You Keep. Her feature work has clustered in horror and disaster pictures, which use her the same way every time, as a competent adult reacting sensibly to something that is not sensible. She is better than most of those films, and she keeps showing up in them anyway.
Movies (11)
TV (6)
Where to start with Sarah Wayne Callies
Prison Break is the correct entry, and not only because it is the famous one. Its first season is a tight, ridiculous, extremely well engineered piece of network television, and Sara Tancredi is the character who has to keep the escape plot tethered to something human.
Go to The Walking Dead next if you want to judge the Lori argument yourself, with the warning that the writing gives her less to hold than it gives almost anyone else in that cast. The better follow-up is Colony, which finally hands Callies a lead written for an adult, and then The Long Road Home, a war drama that uses her stillness properly. Of the horror features, The Other Side of the Door is the most interesting failure and Into the Storm the most watchable, in a found-footage tornado way that never pretends to be anything else.