Rachel Nichols

Rachel Nichols modelled while she was a student at Columbia and moved into acting around 2000, which in practice meant a face in the background of Autumn in New York and a single episode of Sex and the City. Her first real part was the comedy Dumb and Dumberer in 2003. Recognition arrived two years later from two directions at once: Rachel Gibson in the final season of Alias, and the horror remake The Amityville Horror.

What she is good at is playing competence under pressure without softening it. Kiera Cameron in Continuum is the fullest use of it, a police officer stranded outside her own time who has to be the most rational person in every scene while the series keeps taking her certainties away. She carries four seasons of that. The same quality is why genre television keeps hiring her as the professional in the room: Ashley Seaver on Criminal Minds, Rebecca Locke on the short-lived The Inside, Nicole Noone on The Librarians.

The film career has been scrappier than the television one. P2 is a one-location siege picture that rests entirely on her and she is genuinely good in it. Conan the Barbarian and Alex Cross are studio jobs that give her less than her billing suggests, and Star Trek in 2009 is a small part as the Orion cadet Galia. She has kept working in genre since, including Titans and a stretch of independent thrillers, and the television is where to look for her.