Jaime Winstone
Jaime Winstone belongs to a very particular moment in British screen culture. She broke through with Kidulthood in 2006, at the front of a wave of London films about teenagers that were made cheaply, played rough and looked nothing like the costume drama the country was exporting at the time. Anuvahood in 2011 came from the same world, as did Wild Bill.
Her best work is still Dead Set, the 2008 zombie satire set inside a reality television house, where she plays Kelly. It is a nasty, funny, extremely well-constructed piece of television, and it uses her exactly right: she is the one the audience follows because she is the only person behaving sensibly.
The rest of the filmography splits into two lines. There are the genre and comedy credits, Boogie Woogie, Love Rosie, Tomb Raider, Knuckledust, Everyone Is Going to Die. And there is the serious social drama, Made in Dagenham, where she plays Sandra in the story of the Ford machinists' strike, Farming, and Four Lives in 2022, which is the heaviest assignment on the list by a distance.
She has been a recognisable face in British film for twenty years without ever being handed the sort of lead role her early notices suggested was coming, which says more about the industry's appetite for that kind of cinema than about her.
Movies (10)
TV (3)
Where to start with Jaime Winstone
Dead Set first, and it is not close. Five episodes, one location, a premise that should be a one-joke sketch and is instead the sharpest thing anyone made about reality television. Her performance holds the whole thing together.
Kidulthood is the origin point and worth seeing for the moment it captures, though it is a blunt film and it means to be. Made in Dagenham is the crowd-pleaser, a strike story played as comedy-drama with a very good ensemble.
Four Lives is the one to approach carefully. It is a true-story drama about failure and grief, and it asks far more of her than the genre work ever has.
After that, Wild Bill is an underseen and unexpectedly tender London crime film, Love, Rosie is the mainstream romance, and Tomb Raider is the blockbuster credit.