Yvonne Strahovski

Her second decade looks nothing like her first. Yvonne Strzechowski, born in Sydney in 1982 and billed as Yvonne Strahovski, came up through Australian television, including Headland in 2005, before being cast as Sarah Walker in Chuck in 2007. That part ran to 2012 and required her to be warm, capable and slightly out of reach, in a spy comedy that leaned on her to keep the stakes credible while everyone else got the jokes.

What she does now is the opposite of likeable, and she is better at it. Hannah McKay on Dexter from 2012, Kate Morgan in 24: Live Another Day in 2014, and then Serena Joy Waterford across The Handmaid's Tale from 2017 to 2025, a role built to be hated that she plays without once asking the audience for a way out. The performance runs on composure: a woman whose control over her own face is the last power she has. It brought two Primetime Emmy nominations, three Screen Actors Guild nominations and a Golden Globe nomination, and no wins, which is its own kind of career summary.

Film has been the weaker half. She has worked steadily in genre pictures, The Predator, The Tomorrow War, I, Frankenstein, Killer Elite, and voiced Batwoman in animation, without any of them offering the material television keeps handing her. The smaller dramas are more interesting: Angel of Mine, All I See Is You, Manhattan Night. She remains an actor whose best work needs several seasons to accumulate.