Emily Kinney
Emily Kinney is an actor, born 1985.
Emily Kinney's first credits are the kind that do not come with a character name: a waitress in It's Complicated, a small part on Showtime's The Big C. Then AMC cast her as Beth Greene on The Walking Dead, and a Nebraska-born actress who also writes songs became a face several million people recognised on sight.
What she is good at is playing someone whose composure is a choice rather than a temperament. It reads in the small parts as clearly as in the big one: Nurse Daisy Ryan holding her voice level in the surgical theatre of The Knick, Jennifer Schroeder on Forever, Staci Hardwick on Messiah. Casting keeps handing her characters who are being asked to stay steady in a room that is not steady, and she does it without signalling how much effort it costs.
The decade after The Walking Dead has been a run of shows that deserved longer. Conviction, where she played Tess Larson opposite Hayley Atwell, did not get a second run. Neither did Ten Days in the Valley. Neither did Messiah. She has been the reliable element in a lot of television that got cancelled around her, which is a specific kind of career and not a failed one. Love on the Sidelines, a romance made for a gentler audience, sits oddly in that list and is probably the most relaxed she has been allowed to be on camera.
Movies (3)
TV (8)
Where to start with Emily Kinney
Start with The Walking Dead, because there is no honest way around it: the role is the reason the rest of the filmography exists, and it gives her more to do than anything else here. From there, The Knick is the sharpest use anyone has made of her, a period hospital drama that puts her in a room full of men and lets her be the calmest person in it.
Conviction is the closest she has come to a co-lead and is worth an evening even knowing how short its run was. Messiah and Ten Days in the Valley are for people who want the whole record. Love on the Sidelines is the outlier, a soft romance she plays straight rather than winking at. The Big C is where the television career starts, and it is a sighting rather than a performance.