Dichen Lachman

Ms. Casey, the wellness counsellor in Severance (2022), speaks in a low, even voice and hardly moves. She reads out kind statements to people who have no memory of their lives outside the building, and she does it without warmth and without cruelty, which is worse than either. We found her the most disquieting person on the severed floor, because the voice never rises and the face never explains, so we stopped listening to what she said and started watching for what she wanted. Our own review, we should admit, gave the credit to Adam Scott and the office itself; she was doing her work in the background of it.

The background is where Lachman has mostly been. She started on Neighbours (2005–2007) as Katya Kinski, then left Australian television for Los Angeles. "I didn't see myself in that space," she said later, and the space she found instead was American genre television. Joss Whedon gave her the first substantial part, Sierra in Dollhouse (2009–2010), a woman rented out with a new personality loaded in each week. We scored the series 66 and thought it found its nerve late; when we listed the discoveries, the one we named was Enver Gjokaj, as the doll mooning after her, not Lachman herself. Then came a long run of recurring parts, Anya in The 100 (2014), Jiaying in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2015), Reileen Kawahara in Altered Carbon (2018), and franchise work in Jurassic World Dominion (2022) and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024).

The pattern is plain. She is physically capable and she is cast for it: the fight choreography, the stunt work, the leader of the hostile tribe. She says she enjoys that side of the job, and there is no reason to doubt her. But the notices that praise her, and we agree with them, praise restraint rather than movement. The flat delivery, the held pose, the sense of someone operating a body they have been issued. Dollhouse taught her to play a person who has been overwritten, and a decade later Ben Stiller's Severance found the use for it. Science fiction has kept her working and has also kept her in the second rank of the credits, and those are the same fact.

What we have not seen is Lachman carrying anything. Two of her best-known series are on our books and in neither did we find ourselves writing about her at length, which is a description of the parts rather than of the actor. Start with Severance, in the slow early episodes where the office is being built around Scott and she is simply standing at the edge of it. Then Dollhouse, from the point where it stops apologising for itself. Someone should write her a lead in which nobody throws a punch.