Hannah John-Kamen

In Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), Ava Starr's body will not hold together. She passes through walls without meaning to, and John-Kamen plays each pass as a flinch, as if the wall had hit her rather than the other way round. It is a small, exact piece of physical acting, and it does something the script has not asked for: it makes the villain the person in the scene you worry about. Then Laurence Fishburne's Bill Foster explains her in a speech, and the film goes back to Paul Rudd.

That is roughly the shape of the career so far. She trained at the National Youth Theatre and Central, made her screen debut in Misfits (2011), and turned up in The Hour and Happy Valley before getting a proper lead as Dutch in Killjoys (2015–2019), a science-fiction series that established her as someone who could carry the action. The films came as small parts first, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and, on television, Game of Thrones (2016). Then three blockbusters in one year, 2018: Ready Player One for Steven Spielberg, Tomb Raider, and Ghost. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) followed. Almost all of it is genre, almost all of it calls for stunt work or motion capture, and almost none of it is built around her.

What she does well is pain carried in the body rather than the face. In the Ant-Man film she is the one element we kept wanting more of, and we were sorrier for Ava than the film seemed to expect, which is a compliment to her and not to the film. It then asked us to enjoy watching her get hit, and the two feelings did not sit together. The precision is real: she moves like someone who knows where the edges of the frame are and how much a fall costs.

Thunderbolts* (2025) brings Ava back and moves her from villain to something nearer an ally, and it is a better film than the one that introduced her, a film about not feeling well that ought to suit her. But it belongs to Florence Pugh, and John-Kamen is part of the ensemble rather than its point; our own review did not single her out, which is fair to the film if not to her. Seven years on, she is still the interesting problem in somebody else's picture.

She has said what she wants: "I love things that are a little bit too close to home – thought-provoking things that freak me out." Nobody has yet made her one at feature length. Until they do, watch the Ant-Man film for the walls, and put the kettle on when Fishburne starts explaining.