Cara Buono

Cara Buono made her film debut in Gladiator in 1992 and then spent the better part of two decades as one of the reliable faces of New York-shot television. Third Watch, The Dead Zone, Law & Order across nearly thirty years of the franchise, Person of Interest as Martine Rousseau. Her work has drawn nominations for both a Primetime Emmy for guest actress in a drama and a Daytime Emmy for performance in children's programming, which is an unusual pair of credentials to hold at once.

The thing she is repeatedly hired for is competence with something withheld underneath it. Faye Miller on Mad Men in 2010 is the clearest example outside her best-known role, a professional woman in a workplace that has no idea what to do with her. Karen Wheeler on Stranger Things is the same instrument applied to a suburban mother the plot deliberately keeps in the dark: Buono plays a woman with a whole interior life that the show is only occasionally interested in, and it registers anyway.

The film work sits in the margins of other people's stories, and she is good at making the margins count: Owen's mother in Let Me In, Kate in Kicking and Screaming, a wife with a discovery she cannot unmake in A Good Marriage, Bertha Burke in Queen of the Ring. She is a good argument for paying attention to the supporting cast, since the credits show her working steadily since 1992 without ever having had the film role she was owed.