Georgina Campbell
Georgina Campbell is an actor, born 1992.
The BAFTA came early. Georgina Campbell, born in Maidstone in 1992, won the 2015 BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for Murdered by My Boyfriend, a single television film, and became the first black actress to take that award. It is the kind of win that can strand a young performer in respectable drama for a decade. Campbell went the other way.
British television took the first years: Broadchurch, the bleak sitcom Flowers, One of Us, an episode of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, the Agatha Christie adaptation The Pale Horse, and Lyta-Zod across Krypton. Her film debut was a small part in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.
Then Barbarian, and effectively a second career. Playing Tess, a woman who arrives at a Detroit rental that has been booked twice, Campbell had to do the hardest job in modern horror: be the sensible person, make sensible decisions, and remain in the film anyway. She sells it because she plays fear as calculation rather than hysteria, which is also why the film's structural gamble works at all. Since then she has largely stayed in the genre, through Bird Box Barcelona, T.I.M., The Watchers and Cold Storage, and the label of scream queen has attached itself accordingly.
Movies (10)
TV (7)
Where to start with Georgina Campbell
Nothing on the list competes with Barbarian for the first slot. Go in knowing as little as possible, because the film's whole design depends on your assumptions about whose story you are watching, and Campbell is the reason those assumptions hold.
After that the horror run is a mixed bag worth sorting. The Watchers hands her a proper lead and a strong premise it does not entirely earn. Bird Box Barcelona is the franchise entry, competent and impersonal. T.I.M. is the small British one and the most interesting of the three ideas.
For the pre-horror Campbell, Flowers is the surprise: very dark comedy, and she is excellent in it. Krypton is the biggest television part, The Pale Horse the moodiest. Murdered by My Boyfriend, the film that won her the BAFTA, is not among the credits listed here.