Laverne Cox

Orange Is the New Black changed the shape of Cox's career and, for a period, American television's assumptions about who could carry a storyline. She played Sophia Burset, and the nomination that followed in 2014 made her the first transgender person nominated for a Primetime Emmy in an acting category, and the first trans person nominated for any Emmy since the composer Angela Morley in 1990.

Two more firsts came after. In 2015 she won a Daytime Emmy as an executive producer of Laverne Cox Presents: The T Word, making her the first trans woman to take that award. In 2017 she became the first transgender person to play a transgender series regular on American broadcast television, as Cameron Wirth in Doubt.

The acting gets less attention than the milestones, which is a shame, because she is a specific kind of good: she plays authority. Gail in Promising Young Woman is a boss required to be reasonable and useless at the same time. Dr. Cable in Uglies and Detective Nevin in Jolt are institutional power inside a genre film. Kacy Duke in Inventing Anna is the one person in the room with a working sense of proportion. The exception is Frank-N-Furter in the television Rocky Horror remake, a part that offers no authority at all, only nerve.

She also works constantly as herself, in Disclosure, Visible: Out on Television, Amend and The Stroll, which is its own job: being the person who explains the history on camera, patiently, again.