Sarah Rafferty
Sarah Rafferty is an actor, born 1972.
Before Suits, Rafferty had the kind of resume nobody puts on a poster: stage training at the Yale School of Drama, then years of one-episode television parts, plus the 2003 television version of Tremors as Dr. Casey Matthews. She was close to forty when the role that would define her turned up, which is late by the arithmetic of American casting.
What she does better than almost anyone else in that cast is play the person who has already worked out where the scene is going. Donna Paulsen begins as the assistant outside a corner office and ends up the show's emotional switchboard, and Rafferty never pushes it: the raised eyebrow lands a beat before the line does, and most of the comedy comes from her flat refusal to be impressed by lawyers who are working very hard to be impressive. Suits is a formula show, and she is a large part of why the formula stays watchable through the middle seasons.
The second act has been kinder than most post-hit careers. As Katherine Walter, the mother in My Life with the Walter Boys, she picked up a Children's and Family Emmy nomination in the supporting performer category, which is real recognition for a part written mostly as a household anchor. She also co-hosts Sidebar with her former co-star Patrick J. Adams, a podcast in which the two of them work back through Suits one episode at a time. There are worse positions than being paid to annotate the thing you are famous for.
Movies (1)
TV (4)
Where to start with Sarah Rafferty
Start with Suits, and specifically with any episode where Donna has to manage a crisis nobody told her about. That is where Rafferty's timing does work the script only half sets up, and it is the clearest argument for why a supporting character became the reason people stayed.
My Life with the Walter Boys is the useful contrast: a warmer register with much less armour, and the performance that drew her Emmy nomination. If you want her carrying a whole film rather than a scene, All Things Valentine is a small, unpretentious romance that lets her do it. Completists can go back to Tremors, where she plays the resident doctor in a monster series that gives her almost nothing to hold. It is worth ten minutes mainly to measure the distance between that and Donna.