Emily Beecham

In Supergirl (2026) Emily Beecham has a handful of scenes as Alura In-Ze, Kara's mother, on a world that is ending. She plays them opposite David Krumholtz, and between them they do something the rest of the film cannot manage: the second of those scenes left us with a lump in the throat we had not budgeted for. Then the film cut back to a fight in the dark and the feeling had nowhere to go. That is the Beecham pattern in miniature. She is asked to do the quiet, difficult thing, does it, and is handed back to a picture with louder business elsewhere.

She trained at LAMDA and spent the better part of a decade in British television and small features before Into the Badlands (2015–2019) made her a regular as The Widow, a part that asked for martial-arts action as much as acting and got both. That series is why she gets cast in genre at all. Then came Little Joe (2019) for Jessica Hausner, in which she played Alice, an ambitious, cerebral woman under pressure who stops trusting her own judgement. The film divided critics and her work in it did not, which has been the shape of her notices ever since.

What she does, and does better than most, is hold still. She keeps a face level and a voice even for longer than seems wise, so that when the unease arrives it looks like something happening to her rather than something she has decided to show us. Talking about Little Joe, she put it plainly: "What I was focusing on when I shot it was the paranoia element." It is a small toolkit and she uses it exactly. It also explains why writers keep putting her in science fiction and horror with a psychological edge, in 1899 (2022) as Maura Franklin, and now on a dying planet in a superhero film.

The supporting work is harder to read. Cruella (2021) and The Covenant (2023) are ensemble pictures and she is one voice among many in each; we would not pretend to know them as well as we know her Alura. What we can say, on the evidence we have, is that she has not yet been the problem with a film she is in, and that the problem has more often been a film that did not know what it had. Peter Mackie Burns has directed her twice, which suggests at least one director does.

Someone should give her a whole film again and keep the camera on her when it gets uncomfortable. Hausner did it once. Until it happens again there are those few scenes in Supergirl to click through to, and they are worth more than the fight that follows them.