Lara Rossi
Trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Lara Rossi has built the kind of career British television runs on: recurring roles in series that travel, spread across genres that rarely share an audience.
The international breaks came from co-productions. She played Arabela Seeger in Crossing Lines, the pan-European crime series assembled out of German, French, Italian and American money, and Obi Washington in Iron Sky: The Coming Race (2019), the Finnish sequel to a film about moon Nazis, which is exactly the sort of sentence this career requires.
Her most argued-over job is Lady Sybil Ramkin in The Watch (2021), adapted loosely enough from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels to split the readership down the middle. Rossi's Sybil came out of that argument better than most of the show did. Elsewhere the work is more grounded: Kat in Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You (2020), Ruby in the choir drama Military Wives (2020), Jodie Blake in The Midwich Cuckoos (2022), Claudia in Sebastian (2024), Evelyn in the 2018 Robin Hood.
The through-line is not a type but a tolerance for tone. She can do a broad genre picture and a piece of serious contemporary drama in the same year without visibly changing register, which is a less glamorous skill than range and a more employable one.
Movies (6)
TV (6)
Where to start with Lara Rossi
Try I May Destroy You first. It is the best thing on this list by a distance, and although Kat is not a large part, watching her inside Michaela Coel's series tells you more about her instincts than a lead in weaker material would. The Watch is the biggest role, and worth your time if you approach it as a scruffy fantasy police show rather than as Discworld, because Sybil Ramkin is the character the adaptation got closest to right.
Crossing Lines is the procedural, competent and very European, while The Midwich Cuckoos is the better recent genre credit, a cold and patient take on the John Wyndham novel. For film, Military Wives is the crowd-pleaser and Sebastian the serious one, and Iron Sky: The Coming Race is pure novelty that knows it. Robin Hood can wait indefinitely.