Sonoya Mizuno
Sonoya Mizuno is an actor, born 1986.
Mizuno's screen career began with movement. Her earliest roles use her as a dancer or as an object of choreography: one of the roommates in La La Land, a lead in the dance film High Strung, and, most consequentially, Kyoko in Ex Machina, a housekeeper with no dialogue whose entire performance is built from posture and gesture. It is a small part with an outsized effect on the film, and it began a working relationship with Alex Garland that has now run through five projects.
That collaboration is the spine of the career. Annihilation gives her two small roles, Men uses only her voice, Civil War puts her in a war zone, and Devs in 2020 finally handed her the lead. Lily Chan is an engineer investigating something she is not equipped to understand, and Mizuno plays her watchful and slightly closed off, a risky choice for a protagonist and the right one for that show.
Elsewhere she has been used for glamour and comedy, as Araminta in Crazy Rich Asians, and for scheming, as Mysaria on House of the Dragon, a whispering fixer with the best information in the city. She sits now in the odd position of being both a prestige-television regular and a character actor: Maniac, Shortcomings, Am I OK?, Deep Cover, an Elden Ring adaptation on the way. The through line is that directors cast her when they want the audience slightly unsure what a character wants.
Movies (15)
TV (4)
Where to start with Sonoya Mizuno
Begin with Ex Machina, and pay attention to Kyoko even when the film is not asking you to. She has no lines and she is the reason several scenes work at all.
Then Devs, the fullest thing she has done: a slow, strange, very serious limited series about a technology company, and she carries it. It is the best argument for her as a lead, and it is not a difficult watch, only a patient one.
House of the Dragon is where the largest audience knows her, and Mysaria is the best-written part she has had on television. Maniac gives her a brittle scientist in a show that is mostly costume changes, and she gets one of its few genuinely still moments.
For range, Crazy Rich Asians is the fun one, La La Land is where to see the dancer, and Civil War and Annihilation are small parts in large films worth seeing anyway.