CCH Pounder

Pounder's Chief Davis seems capable of running a police force, even one employing Liam Neeson's Frank Drebin Jr. in Akiva Schaffer's The Naked Gun (2025). The comedy needs that authority: a detective's inability to cross a room without breaking something is funnier if his superiors still expect him to function. We laughed at the destruction because Neeson keeps taking the job seriously. Pounder fits a film whose actors must never admit they know it is a comedy.

Her breakthrough came as Brenda, the eccentric café owner in Bagdad Cafe (1987). Television occupied more of her career from the 1990s, with Dr Angela Hicks in ER (1994–97), then the defining seven seasons as Claudette Wyms in The Shield (2002–08). Those professional roles suit her ability to suggest intelligence without making a display of it. As the precinct's moral centre, Wyms gave Pounder's restraint a sustained purpose: an intelligent woman watching people whose conduct she could not approve.

In Cape Fear (2026), her Noa Toussaint brings weight to every scene she is given, but the series stretches its material across ten episodes. Amy Adams's Anna carries the guilt around which the series is built, with Pounder among the supporting players. The performances give us reasons to stay, even when the story struggles to justify the length. Our reservation about such dependable casting is that we would like to see Pounder asked for more than familiar seriousness.

We would sooner recommend John Woo's Face/Off (1997), in which she plays Hollis Miller, than James Cameron's Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025), in which she returns as Mo'at. Woo lets John Travolta and Nicolas Cage make the absurd identity swap convincing, despite overlong gunfire; Cameron's carefully built scenery cannot disguise the repetition. Pounder has played Mo'at since Avatar (2009), but this instalment gives us little reason to spend well over three hours there. For a lighter introduction, start with The Naked Gun, where seriousness has a useful comic purpose.