Taylor Russell
Taylor Russell is an actor, born 1994.
Small parts came first, in Canadian features and teen thrillers nobody saw: If I Had Wings, Pants on Fire, Sea Change, and Ashley in Before I Fall. The job that gave her a profile was Judy Robinson in Netflix's Lost in Space from 2018 to 2021, a large, expensive family series in which she was consistently the calmest thing on screen.
Then 2019 delivered two films on opposite ends of the industry. Escape Room is a puzzle-box horror franchise that needed a lead capable of being frightened intelligently, and Waves is a family drama whose second half belongs to her. The second is the performance to take seriously: she plays grief without any of the usual signalling, and the film trusts her to hold long stretches on very little dialogue.
Bones and All in 2022 confirmed it and won her the Marcello Mastroianni Award. Since then she has gone deliberately slowly: the play The Effect onstage from 2023 to 2024, Bella in Mother, Couch, and Ai'dovor in Hope, due in 2026. She also co-directed the 2020 short documentary The Heart Still Hums with Savanah Leaf, which became the basis for Leaf's feature Earth Mama.
For an actor with this much attention on her, the filmography is small and unusually well chosen, and it looks selected rather than accepted.
Movies (13)
TV (2)
Where to start with Taylor Russell
Skip the franchise for a moment and start with Waves. It is the film that made people pay attention, and her half of it is a study in stillness: long passages where the camera stays on her and she does almost nothing visible, which is the hardest thing on this list.
Then Bones and All, a road movie with a horror premise, and the performance that won her a prize at Venice. It asks her to be tender and appalling in the same scene and she never oversells either.
Escape Room is the commercial one, and it is smarter than a film with that title has to be, largely because she plays the lead as an actual thinker. Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is a sequel and behaves like one. Lost in Space is the family-viewing option and holds up better than expected. Words on Bathroom Walls and Before I Fall are the early work, for people who want to see the shape arriving.