Nicole De Boer

Canadian television employed her for most of a decade before anybody abroad noticed. She was Laura in The Kids in the Hall, Holly in the television Maniac Mansion, Maggie Holden in Catwalk, and worked through Street Legal, E.N.G., Ready or Not and Forever Knight, which is roughly the complete map of Toronto production in that period.

Cube changed the trajectory. As Leaven, the youngest of the people trapped inside it and the one who can do the mathematics, she had to make exposition sound like fear, and she managed it; the film is a cheap, hard, ingenious thing and her performance is a large part of why people still watch it. In the same year she took over the Dax symbiont for the final season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, stepping into a role the series had spent six years defining around somebody else, and she inherited an argument she had not started. The work was better than the reception. She played Ezri as unready, which is precisely what the character was, and the series never gave her the time to prove the point.

Since then she has been a genre television regular. Sarah Bannerman across the 2002 to 2007 run of The Dead Zone is the longest job and the most conventional; Becca D'Orsay on Private Eyes is the most recent. Suck, Metal Tornado and Iron Invader are what a working Canadian actress does between series, and she is entirely unembarrassed about it, which is its own kind of professionalism.