Penny Johnson Jerald

Playing the most competent person in the room is a specialty, and Penny Johnson Jerald has built a career out of it. Born in Baltimore in 1961, she was working in film by the mid-1980s in Swing Shift and The Hills Have Eyes Part 2, and across television in everything from The Paper Chase to Cosby, with sturdy supporting film work alongside it: Laura Simon in Absolute Power, Lorraine Taylor in What's Love Got to Do with It.

The run that matters starts at The Larry Sanders Show, where Beverly Barnes was the assistant who understood how the programme actually got made, and continues through Kasidy Yates on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a recurring part that grew steadily across a very long series. Then 24 gave her Sherry Palmer, a character written with no interest in being liked, and Johnson Jerald played her without once asking the audience for sympathy. That is the through line: she does not soften people to make them easier to watch.

Since then she has run rooms professionally. Castle cast her as Captain Victoria Gates, nicknamed Iron Gates, the superior officer the regulars resented and were usually wrong about. The Orville gave her Dr. Claire Finn, the ship's doctor and the largest, warmest part of her career. She voiced Sarafina in the 2019 Lion King, a small role in an extremely loud film, and she keeps turning up in newer work like ted and Good Fortune. Four decades in, she is still cast as the authority, which says something about how convincingly she carries it.