Katie Findlay
Katie Findlay is an actor, born 1990.
Katie Findlay got the kind of first break that can trap an actor. In The Killing they played Rosie Larsen, the teenager the entire first season is organised around, a part built mostly from photographs, flashbacks and other people's grief. Findlay treated it as a start rather than a ceiling.
What followed was steady television with a recognisable throughline: young women who are being read wrong by everyone in the room. Maggie Landers on The Carrie Diaries from 2013 to 2014, Rebecca Sutter on How to Get Away with Murder, Lucy Parker when they joined Man Seeking Woman for its third season, then Lisbeth on Nancy Drew, Rose on Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist, Kate on Walker Independence and Francine on Fire Country.
The film work is where the range shows. Straight Up, in 2020, handed them a lead built almost entirely on fast overlapping dialogue, comic timing and real anxiety arriving in the same take. Since then: Bonnie in After the Dark, Stormer in Jem and the Holograms, an air hostess in the 2019 Twilight Zone, Lori in Twinless, and Liz in Remarkably Bright Creatures. Findlay is Canadian, born in Windsor, Ontario in 1990, and uses they and them.
Movies (7)
TV (9)
Where to start with Katie Findlay
Straight Up first. It is a small film, it never found the audience it deserved, and it is the clearest evidence of what Findlay can do: comedy at speed, then a change of register mid-sentence.
The Killing is the famous credit and worth watching for how much presence a performer can build out of fragments. The Carrie Diaries is the teen-drama version of the same charisma. How to Get Away with Murder put them in a much harder-edged show, and Man Seeking Woman let them play romantic comedy inside a surrealist sketch series. For recent work, Twinless is the one to chase.