Zazie Beetz

Zazie Beetz is German-American, born in Berlin in 1991, and worked through short films before Applesauce in 2015. Then Donald Glover cast her as Van in Atlanta, and the trajectory changed inside a single season.

Van is a hard part to describe and a harder one to play. She is the ex-partner and the mother in a show mostly about three men drifting, a setup that could easily have made her the nagging obstacle, and Beetz instead made her the person with the clearest view of everyone else's self-deception. The performance earned an Emmy nomination and it works because she plays exhaustion as a form of intelligence rather than as complaint.

Hollywood then hired her for a narrower quality: unbothered cool at the edge of the frame. Domino in Deadpool 2, whose power is luck, is essentially a shrug that saves the day. The Hornet in Bullet Train is a smirk with a weapon. Stagecoach Mary in The Harder They Fall is the only person in that western who appears to be enjoying herself. The exception, and the best film work, is Joker, where she plays a neighbour inside a story locked to the perspective of a man who cannot be trusted, and has to be legible and ambiguous at the same time. She returned to the role in the sequel. Voice work in Invincible and the Bad Guys films has become the steady other half of the job.