Ashley Johnson

Ashley Johnson was a child actor first, playing Chrissy Seaver on Growing Pains from 1990 to 1992, and she is one of the few of that cohort who neither vanished nor made a public project of having survived it. She simply kept working, and the more interesting half of her career happened in rooms with a microphone in them.

Voice work is where she is most valuable. She was Gretchen on Recess, Terra on Teen Titans, Gwen Tennyson across the Ben 10 series, Tulip and Lake on Infinity Train, and she provided the voice and performance capture for Ellie in The Last of Us, which is the most demanding thing on her record and the reason a generation knows her without recognising her face. The common thread is that she plays clever, slightly abrasive girls who are not asking to be liked, and she never sweetens them.

On camera she has had two long runs, Amber Ahmed on The Killing and Patterson on Blindspot from 2015 to 2020, plus small parts in The Help and What Women Want and a few well-remembered seconds in The Avengers as the waitress the film cuts to when it needs a human scale. Since 2015 she has been a cast member on Critical Role, the Dungeons and Dragons stream whose campaigns have since been adapted into animation as The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein. She became president of its charity foundation when that launched in 2020, which is an unusual second job for a working actor and tells you something about where her attention actually is.