Odette Annable

Odette Annable has spent a career being the thing a genre plot is organised around. Cloverfield is the clearest case: Beth McIntyre is the reason the characters cross Manhattan at all, which makes her the destination rather than the traveller, and Annable has to make a woman the audience has barely met worth the trip.

The rest follows a similar shape. Dr. Jessica Adams on House, Aubrey on October Road, Casey Beldon carrying the horror film The Unborn, Nola Longshadow in Banshee, Trudy Cooper in The Astronaut Wives Club, Geri Broussard in Walker. Reliable, capable, usually written as the sensible one, rarely handed the camera for long.

Supergirl is the exception and the argument for her. Playing Samantha Arias and Reign across a season means alternating between an anxious single mother and an engineered destroyer, and Annable is noticeably better as the second. There is a hardness available to her that most of her casting has ignored, and the villain half of that part is the only role on this list that goes looking for it. Elsewhere she has voiced Chloe in two Beverly Hills Chihuahua sequels, which is the other side of a working actor's ledger, and she keeps returning to genre: And Soon the Darkness, Tell Me a Story, Fantasy Island.