Karla Crome
Karla Crome is an actor, born 1988.
Screen International named Karla Crome one of its UK Stars of Tomorrow in 2012, the year Hit & Miss put her on Sky Atlantic as Riley. She had trained at the Italia Conti academy in London and came up the ordinary British television route: guest parts, short runs, no film launch. The other early credit that carried her name was E4's Misfits, where she joined as the series regular Jess, and she has also worked on the drama Murder.
What she is good at is watchfulness. Crome tends to underplay, using fewer gestures than the scene expects, giving you a character who seems to be running arithmetic on everyone else in the room. It makes her useful in stories where the audience is not meant to be certain about her, which is roughly the brief for Layla in You, Me and the Apocalypse and for Bella in Harlan Coben's Lazarus.
She moves between register and period without visibly changing gear: Tourmaline Larou in the steampunk fantasy Carnival Row, Dorothy Wellesley in the Bloomsbury drama Vita & Virginia, Pattie Walker in Toxic Town. She writes as well as acts. The recent stretch of work points at a career of solid, serious supporting leads rather than a single breakout, which in British television is the more durable outcome anyway.
Movies (1)
TV (7)
Where to start with Karla Crome
Start with Misfits. It is the role that made her name and the one where her particular quality is most legible: everyone else in that show plays loud, and Jess plays careful, which is what makes her land. Then Hit & Miss, the Sky Atlantic drama that put her on the map, where the register is bleak rather than antic.
After that, follow the tone you want. Carnival Row is her in full genre costume; Vita & Virginia is the literary end, all clipped Bloomsbury manners; You, Me and the Apocalypse is the comic one. The two 2025 British dramas, Toxic Town and Harlan Coben's Lazarus, are the best evidence of where she is now, which is working steadily in the kind of ensemble piece where you notice her before you place her.