Marla Sokoloff
Marla Sokoloff is an actor, born 1980.
Sokoloff spent her teens playing the girl somebody's parents were wary of. Cokie Mason in The Baby-Sitters Club, Gia on Full House, Jody Lynch on Party of Five: sharper, older-seeming, visibly less interested in being liked than whichever lead she was standing next to. It is an unglamorous specialism and a genuinely useful one, because a likeable protagonist needs somebody to push against, and that somebody has to be believable rather than cartoonish.
The Practice broke the pattern. As Lucy Hatcher she worked the front desk of a Boston criminal defence firm, and the part grew into the show's connective tissue, the one character permitted to be funny in a series where everybody else is carrying a verdict. It is the best sustained work she has done, and it is why the rest of the career happened.
The comedies cluster around the turn of the century: Maggie Carter in Whatever It Takes, Lisa Janusch in Sugar & Spice, Wilma in Dude, Where's My Car?. After that the work spread out and became less visible without becoming less frequent. She voiced Kiina in Bionicle: The Legend Reborn, played Dani Kirkland on The Fosters, came back as Gia in Fuller House, and settled into the holiday-movie circuit with Christmas in Boston, A Christmas Wedding Date and The Merry Gentlemen. That last category gets condescended to, but those films live or die on whether a lead can make thin material feel warm, and she reliably can.
Movies (13)
- Dude, Where's My Car? (2000)
- True Crime (1995)
- Sugar & Spice (2001)
- Whatever It Takes (2000)
- The Baby-Sitters Club (1995)
- Bionicle: The Legend Reborn (2009)
- The Merry Gentlemen (2024)
- Freaky Friday (1995)
- A Christmas Wedding Date (2012)
- A Happening of Monumental Proportions (2017)
- A Date with Darkness: The Trial and Capture of Andrew Luster (2003)
- Do You Take This Man (2017)
- Christmas in Boston (2005)
TV (9)
Where to start with Marla Sokoloff
Nothing else she has done matches The Practice. Start there, and specifically with the stretch once Lucy Hatcher stops being a receptionist gag and becomes the show's human barometer: it is a heavy, grim legal drama and she is the reason it breathes.
For the teenage work, watch Full House and then Fuller House back to back, because playing the same character twenty-odd years apart, in a show that has become a sequel to itself, is a strange and instructive thing to see an actor do.
The turn-of-the-century comedies are the fun tier. Whatever It Takes and Sugar & Spice both use her sharpness properly, and Dude, Where's My Car? is exactly as silly as you remember. If you want the current version, The Merry Gentlemen is the holiday-film lead she has spent a decade getting good at.