Chelah Horsdal

Chelah Horsdal's early credits read like a list of things that happen at the edges of other people's films: Asst. DA #3 in The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a security guard in The Pink Panther, a young mother in Paycheck, a nurse in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a part in The Cabin in the Woods credited only as Demo Girl. That is a decade of jobbing work on other people's productions, which hands a Canadian actor competence-shaped roles with no names attached.

The Man in the High Castle changed the shape of it. Helen Smith is the wife of a senior American Nazi officer, a suburban housewife in an occupied country, and the part demands that she be entirely convincing as someone who made peace with the unspeakable years ago and is now losing that peace very slowly. Horsdal plays it without ever asking the audience for sympathy, which is exactly why it works: the horror is that she is recognisable.

Since then she has mostly been cast as authority. She is the President of the United Federation of Planets on Star Trek: Discovery, Margaret Palmer on Hell on Wheels, a run of mothers and administrators in studio pictures, and a returning face on Firefly Lane. It is a familiar mid-career trade for a character actress and mostly a fair one, though it is worth saying that she is far better at ambivalence than at command. Nothing since High Castle has asked her for what High Castle asked.