Laura Harris
Laura Harris is an actor, born 1976.
Laura Harris started young and local, in Vancouver, which in the early 1990s meant American productions shooting cheaply in British Columbia. The earliest credits here are exactly that: a girlfriend in a 1992 comedy, a one-scene teenager on a superhero series, a role in the 1996 Sabrina the Teenage Witch film. She has been credited under three variations of her own name across that period.
The Faculty, in 1998, made her legible to casting directors: a small-town student in a high school science fiction horror picture, playing sweetness with something else underneath it. That became her line. Marie Warner in the second season of 24 works on the same principle, and so does Daisy Adair in Dead Like Me, Bryan Fuller's afterlife comedy, where she is vain, funny and impossible to dislike. Harris is very good at making pleasantness feel like a strategy.
The 2000s gave her Severance in 2006, a British horror comedy considerably better than it needed to be, and a run of network genre series: Jake 2.0, The Dead Zone, Women's Murder Club, Defying Gravity. Then the credits thin sharply after 2013. She turned up again in 2021 in the children's series Scaredy Cats and a television film, and has Remarkably Bright Creatures dated 2026 here, so whatever the pause was, it was not a retirement.
Movies (15)
- Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026)
- The Faculty (1998)
- A Mighty Wind (2003)
- Stay Tuned (1992)
- Severance (2006)
- Underworld: Endless War (2011)
- Gone Mom: The Disappearance of Jennifer Dulos (2021)
- Susie Q (1996)
- Suicide Kings (1997)
- Officer Down (2013)
- Just the Ticket (1998)
- Snowmageddon (2011)
- Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996)
- The Manor (1999)
- The Calling (2000)
TV (10)
Where to start with Laura Harris
The Faculty is the start, partly because it is the role that defines her and partly because it is a fast, mean, well-cast 1998 horror film full of people who got more famous afterwards. Read nothing about it first.
Dead Like Me is the better show, though: two seasons of afterlife bureaucracy created by Bryan Fuller, with Harris in the most purely enjoyable part in it. From there, 24 and its second season for the thriller machinery, and Severance if you want to watch her carry a horror comedy rather than decorate one.
Defying Gravity is the interesting failure, a slow, sincere space drama cancelled before its story could arrive, and Jake 2.0 is pleasant, disposable spy television for anyone who misses that era of network scheduling. Skip the direct-to-video thrillers unless you are working through the whole list.