Milly Alcock

Australian television employed her for years before anyone outside it noticed. The early credits are the domestic staple: small parts in Wonderland and A Place to Call Home, then Janet King, Pine Gap, Reckoning and The Gloaming. Upright was the one that changed the temperature. As Meg, a runaway sharing a road trip with a wreck of a man, she was funny, prickly and completely unsentimental, and it brought an AACTA Award nomination.

Then House of the Dragon handed her the young Rhaenyra, and what she did with it is worth naming precisely. She played a teenager who has been told she matters and cannot yet tell whether the adults mean it, which is a much harder note than regal authority, and it earned her a Critics' Choice nomination. She plays only the younger version, so the performance stands as a closed unit rather than an arc, and it is the stretch of that series people argue about most.

What follows is a fast escalation: Sirens in 2025, then Kara Zor-El in the DC film Supergirl, with Man of Tomorrow queued behind it. Whether she is a leading actress or a very good character actress who has been handed a franchise is a genuinely open question, and the next two films will answer it. On the evidence so far she is better at small, spiky, uncomfortable people than at heroism, which makes the casting either a mistake or the most interesting thing about it.