Caity Lotz
Caity Lotz is an actor, born 1986.
Caity Lotz came to acting from dance, and that background is still the most useful fact about her as a performer. She worked up through small parts, including Stephanie Horton on Mad Men, then got a proper showcase as Officer Kirsten Landry in the MTV mockumentary Death Valley in 2011 and a horror lead as Annie Barlow in The Pact the following year, a role she went back to for the sequel.
Arrow made the difference. Cast as Sara Lance in 2012, she turned a supporting part into a franchise fixture, and by 2016 she was leading DC's Legends of Tomorrow as Sara Lance and White Canary. The training reads on screen. She moves like someone who has spent years in a studio, and the choreography is built to show it, which buys the character a credibility that dialogue could never establish.
The other half of the Legends job was tonal. That show drifted steadily toward comedy, and Lotz had to be the straight line the jokes bend around while still selling a captain who could plausibly hit someone. It is an underrated piece of work. Alongside the television she has kept a small independent filmography going, including The Machine, 400 Days and Small Town Crime.
Movies (7)
TV (5)
Where to start with Caity Lotz
The efficient route is Arrow for the introduction and DC's Legends of Tomorrow for the payoff. Sara arrives on the first as a complication in someone else's story and ends up captaining the second, and watching that promotion happen is more interesting than either show is on its own.
Horror viewers should go to The Pact, a small, mean, effective film that gave her a lead before the networks did. The Machine is the strange one, a science fiction picture that asks her to play something not quite human. Small Town Crime is the best of the recent independents, and Death Valley is the early comic role proving she could always do deadpan.