Linda Cardellini

Linda Cardellini has spent twenty-five years being the best thing in projects of wildly varying quality. Freaks and Geeks was cancelled after a single season and remains the template: Lindsay Weir is a clever girl trying on an identity, and Cardellini plays the trying-on rather than the identity, which is why the performance still reads as true.

ER gave her six years of network drama and the discipline that comes with it. Then came a long stretch as the recognisable supporting wife or sister, in Brokeback Mountain, The Founder, Green Book and the Avengers films, where Laura Barton exists mainly to give Hawkeye a reason to go home. She is very good at that work and it is not what she is for.

Bloodline and Dead to Me finally gave her leads. Dead to Me in particular used something the earlier casting had missed: she is funny in a bleak, clenched way, and she can hold two incompatible things at once for a whole season without letting the audience settle on either. It earned her an Emmy nomination, as did a short guest run on Mad Men that did the same trick in a fraction of the time.

She also voices cartoons constantly, in Gravity Falls, Regular Show and Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, and she played Velma in live action twice, which for a certain generation is the only credit that counts.