Kelly Stables

Sitcoms have kept her employed for twenty years and they are only half the story. Stables, born in St Louis in 1978, played Melissa on Two and a Half Men from 2008, Eden Konkler on The Exes from 2011 to 2015, and Kelly Watson on Superstore from 2017, three network jobs that run more or less back to back and describe a genuinely steady career.

The second half is voice work, and it is where the range is. She was Will Vandom, the lead, in the animated W.I.T.C.H., and Arrowette in Young Justice, and she has spent years being cast as children: Harold in Dog Man, Rocky the Cave Kid in Cavemen, a kid in Hoodwinked. That is a real specialism, not a fallback. An adult who can hold a child's voice for a whole feature without it curdling into a cartoon squeak is rare, and studios keep hiring her back for it, through Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Scroll, Tom and Jerry: The Lost Dragon, Dolittle, Paws of Fury and The Bad Guys 2.

The outlier in the filmography is the horror credit. In The Ring Two she is billed as Evil Samara, playing the thing two films had been building towards, which sits oddly beside a career otherwise made of bright comedy. She also turns up in Horrible Bosses 2, Pride and Prejudice, and briefly as a ghost in The Haunted Mansion.

No breakout, no reinvention, just an unusually wide set of skills quietly monetised across network television and animation.