Jessica Biel

In Hitchcock (2012) Jessica Biel plays Vera Miles, the actress, in a film about the making of Psycho, and it ought to be a part with something in it. We came out unable to recall a single thing she had been given to do, and when we reviewed the film we did not mention her at all. That is the film's failing rather than hers, and it is also the story of a good deal of her career. In Planet 51 (2009) she is the voice of Neera, the girl the hero is too nervous to ask to the dance, and that is the whole of the part.

She arrived young, a child singer in musical theatre who then spent ten years as Mary Camden in 7th Heaven, and made her first film, Ulee's Gold, in 1997. The films that followed kept casting her for her fitness. Erin Hardesty in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) runs; Charissa Sosa in The A-Team (2010) shoots; Blade: Trinity (2004) sits between them. When she was not running she was the girlfriend in somebody else's comedy, in I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007) and Valentine's Day (2010), parts that need a face and a reaction shot. The word that attached itself to her for years was capable, which is what people say about an actor they have not seen asked to do anything.

Two films suggested what was being wasted. In The Illusionist (2006) she is Sophie, in a period piece opposite Edward Norton; in Easy Virtue (2008) she is Larita Whittaker in a Noël Coward adaptation, English accent and comic timing both. Neither changed the kind of part she was offered. "Sometimes you just got to do it yourself," she said in 2017, and by then she had. Iron Ocean Films, founded with Michelle Purple, produced The Sinner (2017), with Biel as Cora Tannetti opposite Bill Pullman, and then Candy (2022) and The Better Sister (2025). These are television programmes rather than films, and we have not reviewed them, so we will not judge them here. We can describe the shape: a woman with an ordinary public face and a buried history, a crime, and the question of why she did it.

That shape is now so much hers that the risk is obvious. An actor who builds her own vehicles can end up building the same one each time, and the quiet woman with the hidden past is a part with limits. But it is a part she chose, which the earlier ones were not. If you want to see what the studio films were standing next to, Easy Virtue is the place to start; the two of hers we have reviewed give her almost nothing to do.