Selenis Leyva

Selenis Leyva started Off-Broadway and then spent years doing what New York actors do: single episodes of the shows that shoot there, a customs inspector in Maria Full of Grace, a part on Law & Order, a part on Girls. Nothing about that stretch predicted the size of what came next.

Gloria Mendoza on Orange Is the New Black (2013 to 2019) is one of the best-written parts in that ensemble, and Leyva plays her on two settings at once. Gloria runs the kitchen, which makes her a source of comfort and also the person with power over everyone's food, and Leyva never separates the warmth from the threat. She is maternal in a way that is clearly conditional, and that unresolved quality is what keeps the character from becoming the prison-mother stereotype it could easily have been.

Since then she has had the leads: Gabi in Diary of a Future President and Rosie in Lopez vs Lopez, both of which use her comic timing far more than the drama did. On film she turns up in sharply chosen supporting parts, Ms. Warren in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Rosa Diaz in Breaking, Laura Chavez in Creed III, where the requirement is to make a few minutes of screen time feel like a whole life. The catalogue here is short by character-actor standards, which mostly means the good years came late.