Alice Eve

Alice Eve was born in London in 1982 to two working actors, Trevor Eve and Sharon Maughan, and started where a lot of well-connected British performers start: supporting parts in respectable films. Hawking, Stage Beauty, then Starter for 10 in 2006, where she is very good in a part designed to be looked at.

That last detail became the pattern. For most of a decade she was cast as the beautiful woman other characters react to, in films that seldom asked for anything beyond the reaction shot: She's Out of My League, Sex and the City 2, Men in Black 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Raven. She is perfectly capable in all of them and none of them are interested in finding out what else she can do. The exception is comedy, where she has better timing than her casting suggests.

The work worth seeking out is smaller and mostly on television. Her Black Mirror episode is the best thing on her CV precisely because the part requires her to be radiant and hollow at the same time, and she plays both without flagging either. Bombshell has her as a real broadcaster inside a newsroom of impersonations. Iron Fist gave her Mary Walker, a genuinely difficult role in a poor series, and the British dramas, Ordeal by Innocence, Belgravia and The Power, have used her better than Hollywood ever managed.