Claire Foy

Towards the end of the first hour of Unsane (2018), a nurse tells Claire Foy's Sawyer Valentini, quite kindly, that she signed for a voluntary stay. Foy's face does the arithmetic. Nothing on it moves that you could point to, and you watch a woman work out that she is trapped and that shouting about it is what will keep her there. That is the thing she does. The thinking is on the surface and the feeling is underneath it, and she trusts us to find both without help.

She came up through small television parts and the stage, then Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit (2008), and it was Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall (2015) that told us what sort of actor she was. Her Anne is quick, rude and clever, and Foy lets her be disliked. The Crown (2016–2017) made her known everywhere as the young Elizabeth II, and 2018 brought the films: Janet Shearon in First Man and Soderbergh's Unsane. Since then it has been mostly ensembles and grief, Women Talking (2022), All of Us Strangers (2023), H Is for Hawk (2025), until The Magic Faraway Tree (2026) let her be funny.

Anger suits her. Her Salome in Women Talking has already gone at a man with a scythe before the film begins and enters every scene as if she has been holding her breath since; when she says she will kill anyone who touches her child again, we believed her, and it frightened us slightly. Grief suits her more. In All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh gives her a kitchen and a grown son telling her he is gay, and Foy plays the next minute as a woman reaching for something kind and finding the wrong words, one after another. We came apart in that scene, and it was the fear under the disapproval that did it, which is love with nowhere to go. In H Is for Hawk she handles the goshawk herself, arm steady, voice down to a murmur, and plays Helen as short-tempered and not asking for sympathy. She has said the training was about "making my internal rhythm match the birds' rhythm", and you can see it.

The films are often less than she is. H Is for Hawk runs half an hour long and is too polite to hurt; Unsane settles in its last forty minutes for the sillier of the two films it might have been; Foy is good all the way through both. That makes her a reason to watch films we would not otherwise send you to. Philippa Lowthorpe has directed her twice and Andrew Garfield has played opposite her twice, most recently as the cheerful husband to her sensible Polly in The Magic Faraway Tree, where she gets laughs from the part that is not written to have any. We would like to see what she does with a character who is wrong.