Melissa Benoist
Melissa Benoist is an actor, born 1988.
Glee ran on a conveyor belt of new students and most of them vanished without a trace. Benoist arrived as Marley Rose and became a series regular in the show's fifth season, which is the sort of credit that either evaporates or converts. Hers converted, twice over, in opposite directions.
The first conversion was Whiplash. She has a handful of scenes in it, and they are the ones where the film lets somebody be ordinary, which is much harder to play than it looks next to all that shouting. The second was Supergirl, a title role she held from 2015 to 2021 on a show that began at CBS and finished at The CW. That job asked for six years of unironic sincerity in a period when almost every other superhero property was hedging with jokes, and she never once winked at the camera. The series around her was wildly uneven; her performance in it was not.
Twice she has been cast as the wife of a man at the center of an American catastrophe, Rachel Koresh in Waco and Katherine Russell in Patriots Day, and both times the role is essentially to be looked at by a nation and give nothing away. She has also sung on Broadway, playing Carole King. Since the cape came off, the work has been steadier than starry: a lead in The Girls on the Bus, Bree Buckley in The Waterfront, Teela in Masters of the Universe: Revolution.
Movies (10)
TV (6)
Where to start with Melissa Benoist
Two hours of Whiplash tells you more about the actor than a full season of anything else, but it is a supporting part, so treat it as a taster rather than a case.
The real body of work is Supergirl, and the honest advice is to watch the first season and the last, since the middle sags in the way long network runs do. Glee is where she started, and the Marley episodes hold up better than the show's reputation suggests. For the range, put Waco next to Patriots Day: same basic assignment, a woman standing near a disaster she cannot control, and two quite different performances. Danny Collins and The Girls on the Bus are the low-key ones worth a Sunday.