Rosario Dawson

Rosario Dawson is an actor, born 1979.

Rosario Dawson made her feature debut as a teenager in Kids (1995), Larry Clark's deliberately unpleasant portrait of New York adolescence. Very few people who start that way get a thirty-year career, and the reason she did is that she turned out to be a working actor rather than a discovery: by the early 2000s she was in Spike Lee's He Got Game and 25th Hour, in Men in Black II, The Rundown and Rent.

Her most useful quality is credibility. Directors cast her when a stylised film needs one person the audience will believe, which is why she works so well in comic-book material: Gail in Sin City and its sequel, Claire Temple across five Marvel Netflix series from 2015 to 2018, where she was effectively the connective tissue between four shows, and the live-action Ahsoka Tano in the Star Wars franchise.

A large voice career runs alongside, mostly animation for Disney, Marvel, Warner Bros. and Nickelodeon: Wonder Woman in a run of DC animated films and in Space Jam: A New Legacy, Batgirl in The Lego Batman Movie.

The remainder is genuinely eclectic. She is the best thing in Danny Boyle's Trance, an underrated presence in Unstoppable, a repeat collaborator with Kevin Smith from Clerks II through Clerks 3, and part of the stunt-driving ensemble in Tarantino's Death Proof. She is also a longtime activist and has never treated that as a separate department from the acting.

TV (15)

Where to start with Rosario Dawson

Skip the debut for now and start at 25th Hour. Spike Lee's post-9/11 New York drama gives her the least showy role in the ensemble and she holds every scene she is in, which is the strongest single argument for her.

If you do want the beginning, Kids is still hard to sit through and still remarkable. Sin City is where she became a comic-book fixture, Death Proof is the most fun she has looked on screen, and Trance is the strangest thing she has done, a hypnosis thriller that hands her the real power in the story. Marvel's Daredevil is the Netflix run to sample, since Claire Temple is at her best there before the crossovers stretched her thin. Ahsoka is the current headline job, patient and a little solemn, and Rent is the one for people who want to hear her sing.

The independent films

Where the career started and where the best work still is. Kids put her on screen at fifteen with no training, and 25th Hour is the film that proved it was not luck.

The comic-book work

Claire Temple ran across four Marvel Netflix series as the connective tissue holding the whole shared world together, and Ahsoka finally gave her the Star Wars role fans had spent a decade requesting.

Voicing Wonder Woman

She has played Diana in most of the animated DC films of the last decade, which is a substantial body of work that almost nobody attributes to her. The Justice League Dark films are the best of them.

The studio films

Two decades of large American pictures where she is generally the most grounded thing on screen. Unstoppable and The Rundown are the two that hold up best on a rewatch.

Genres Rosario Dawson works in

More about Rosario Dawson

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