Erica Durance
Erica Durance is an actor, born 1978.
Almost nothing was on her resume when Smallville cast her, which turned out to be the point. Durance was born in Calgary in 1978 and her early credits are the Canadian genre bottom shelf: Johanna in the video-game adaptation House of the Dead and a tornado television movie called Devil Winds, both in 2003.
Then she became Lois Lane, from 2004 until the show finished in 2011, and did something the part badly needed. Her Lois arrived loud, unimpressed and funny, a working reporter with no patience for the show's teenage solemnity, and that friction rebuilt a series which had been running on longing for four seasons. Whatever else Smallville is, it improves the moment she walks in.
Saving Hope gave her the lead she had earned: Dr. Alex Reid, from 2012 to 2017, in a Canadian medical drama with a metaphysical conceit sitting alongside the surgery. Five years of network hours is a different discipline from playing a comic-book icon, and she is steady across all of it.
Since then she has largely circled back to the genre that made her, including Alura Zor-El on Supergirl. The Butterfly Effect 2, Beyond Sherwood Forest and the 2011 Charlie's Angels revival fill in the rest. It is a career that found one very good role, held it for seven years, and then found another.
Movies (4)
TV (4)
Where to start with Erica Durance
You cannot get around Smallville, and you do not have to start at the beginning: jump in at the fourth season, where Lois Lane walks into the show and it gets funnier overnight. Saving Hope is the better argument for her as a lead, a medical drama with a strange metaphysical wrinkle that she plays completely straight, which is why it holds together at all. Supergirl is the encore, a smaller part in the same corner of the universe. Below that, expect a steep drop: The Butterfly Effect 2 is a sequel nobody asked for, House of the Dead is famously terrible and briefly fun for it, and Charlie's Angels is a curiosity from a revival that did not last.