Jessica Henwick

Henwick has spent a decade inside enormous franchises that never quite worked out what to do with her. She was Nymeria Sand on Game of Thrones, part of a subplot the show is not proud of. She was Colleen Wing across Iron Fist and The Defenders, the best thing in a series almost nobody defends. She was Bugs in The Matrix Resurrections, effectively the audience's guide through a film about franchises, and Suzanne Brewer in The Gray Man, where the job was mostly exposition in a corridor.

The interesting work is smaller. In Glass Onion she plays Peg, a personal assistant whose entire function is absorbing another adult's tantrums, and she gets more comedy out of exhaustion than most of the starrier cast get out of their written jokes. The Royal Hotel puts her behind the bar of a remote Australian mining pub as the half of a backpacking pair who insists everything is fine, which is a harder and much less sympathetic job than playing the one who is scared.

She writes and directs as well. Her 2022 short film Bus Girl was nominated for a BAFTA, and in 2026 she recorded Narcissa Malfoy for the full-cast Harry Potter audiobooks. The through line is a performer more precise than her casting has usually bothered to ask for.