Murphy's trick is to play a woman performing herself and then show us the moment the performance drops. Alexis Rose made her; Allison McRoberts showed what she does when the smile comes off. The question is who will write her the parts that use both.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Annie Murphy's hands. As Alexis Rose in Schitt's Creek (2015) the wrist lifts, the fingers flutter, and every sentence tilts upward at the end as if asking permission it has no intention of waiting for. It is a performance built from mannerisms, and over six series the mannerisms stop being the joke and start being the person. We said at the time that hers was the performance that grew most over the run, and it still is: Alexis arrives as a punchline and leaves as somebody we would miss.
She had been working since 2007, mostly in small dramatic parts in Canadian and American productions, while looking for comedy work. Alexis gave her that, and then threatened to be the only thing anyone would offer. The parts that followed leaned towards the same privileged, performing women, and she went looking for the opposite. "It was really important to me that I find a character that's worlds away from Alexis," she said in 2021, and found Allison McRoberts.
Kevin Can FK Himself (2021) asks her to be two people in one body. In the living room she is a sitcom wife, bright and brittle, every line pitched for the back row; walk through to the kitchen and the smile is wiped off and her voice drops half an octave. Murphy makes the switch in the width of a doorframe. What stayed with us was the quiet: Allison alone in a car or a diner booth, saying nothing while the plan forms on her face. We found it more unsettling than anything in the crime plot, because we had just watched the same face do a laugh-track double take. The series around her thins over sixteen episodes; she does not. Valerie Armstrong wrote her the part and she holds the show up.
Since then she has moved quickly and not always to her advantage. Black Mirror's "Joan Is Awful" (2023) suits her, a high-concept episode that asks her to shift tone mid-scene. Russian Doll (2022) and Fingernails (2023) use her in support. The voice work in Praise Petey (2023) lets the Alexis register loose at full volume, and the show around it was tame. A fair criticism has surfaced around All That She Wants: the high, fast comic mode can look dated when nothing is pulling against it. On Schitt's Creek the pull came from Catherine O'Hara and Dan Levy; on Kevin it came from the kitchen.
All That She Wants was written for her by David West Read, who wrote on Schitt's Creek, which tells you how strong the pull of that first part still is. We would rather see her in the kitchen than the living room. The roles that use both rooms at once are rare, and she has already shown she can play them; what she needs now is somebody to keep writing them.
Biography
Annie Murphy is a Canadian actress. Born Anne Frances Murphy in Ottawa, Ontario, on 19 December 1986, she studied theatre performance at Concordia University after a year at Queen’s University and trained at the Canadian Film Centre Actors’ Conservatory.
She is best known for playing Alexis Rose in the CBC sitcom Schitt’s Creek (2015–2020). For the role she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2020 and received nominations for a Golden Globe Award and Critics’ Choice Television Awards. Murphy has also starred as the lead in the dark comedy series Kevin Can Fk Himself (2021–2022) and appeared in Russian Doll and the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful” (2023). Earlier credits include the web series The Plateaus, which she co-created.
