Sonequa Martin-Green
Sonequa Martin-Green is an actor, born 1985.
The route in was slow and mostly on television. Independent films first, then a first recurring role as Courtney Wells on The Good Wife, followed by Tamara in Once Upon a Time and Rhonda in New Girl, none of which are in our catalogue, plus the short-lived police drama NYC 22 in 2012. Then Sasha Williams on The Walking Dead, which is where a large audience finally met her.
Star Trek: Discovery gave her the lead from 2017, and Michael Burnham is a genuinely difficult assignment: a character built to be the most capable person in the room and simultaneously the most emotionally exposed, inside a franchise whose leads traditionally suppressed the second half of that. Martin-Green plays competence under strain better than almost anyone currently working in television, and she can cry on camera without surrendering an ounce of authority, which is rarer than it sounds and is the reason the series works when it works.
The film credits are lighter: Kamiyah James in Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021), the Christmas comedy Holiday Rush (2019), Merit in My Dead Friend Zoe (2024), Sarah's Oil (2025), She Dances (2026). She has also spent an unusual amount of camera time as herself, on Talking Dead, The Ready Room and Star Trek Day, which is its own kind of job and one that franchise leads increasingly cannot avoid.
Boston Blue (2025) is the pivot: a network procedural, a detective called Lena Silver, and a deliberate step outside genre after years spent inside it.
Movies (5)
TV (10)
Where to start with Sonequa Martin-Green
The lead role is the point, so Star Trek: Discovery is where to start, and specifically its first season, which asks more of her than anything else she has done while giving her the least support.
The Walking Dead is the other essential and the better introduction if Star Trek is not your thing. Sasha gets a long, well-built arc and Martin-Green is one of the few cast members the writing served consistently.
My Dead Friend Zoe is the film to watch: a small, sharp story about veterans that hands her the kind of role television keeps not offering. Boston Blue is the current one and the most conventional thing she has done, which after all those years of genre television reads as a deliberate choice.
Space Jam: A New Legacy and Holiday Rush are the family options and neither needs her particular gifts. NYC 22 is where the record starts, if you want the working actor before the franchises.
The two franchises
Sasha on The Walking Dead and then five seasons carrying a Star Trek flagship, which took the franchise fifty years to hand to a Black woman. Both shows have companion programmes she appears in as herself.
The films and recent work
The work away from the two franchises. Space Jam is the biggest, My Dead Friend Zoe is the recent independent film and the most interesting of them, and Boston Blue is the new procedural lead.