Jessica Paré underplays. Where everyone else leans in, she says the line as if it were speech, and the scene tilts towards her. It is a gift that gets overlooked in ensembles, and it is the reason to stay with Crew Girl on dry land.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Jessica Paré does in Crew Girl (2026) when the rowing stops. Vivian Lin's series is a stiff private-school soap whenever it leaves the water, and most of the cast play it as though the lines had been underlined for them. Paré, as Ella Emerson-Tao, does the opposite. She plays the mother as a woman who has made a large decision and is not sure it was the right one, and she takes most of the laughs the series has by saying less than everyone around her. Her scenes with her daughter are the only relationship in the programme that behaves like one. When she leaves a room, the dialogue goes back to sounding like dialogue.
She has been doing this for a quarter of a century, mostly from the side of the frame. Denys Arcand cast her in the lead of Stardom (2000) after she auditioned for a smaller part, and a run of Canadian films followed, Lost and Delirious (2001) and Wicker Park (2004) among them, before a move to Los Angeles around 2004 for Jack & Bobby. Then came long gaps between parts that mattered. The one that changed things was Megan Calvet Draper on Mad Men (2010–2015), Don Draper's second wife, a recurring role that grew into a series one under Matthew Weiner. "Mad Men really changed my life," she said later. "Before I got this job I was moving back to Canada." Since then there has been a long stint in the main cast of SEAL Team (2017–2024), where she also directed episodes, and voice work for The Simpsons among others.
What critics noticed on Mad Men was a tomboyish energy set against the period glamour, and a willingness to sing, most famously the "Zou Bisou Bisou" number. What we notice is the ease. She is repeatedly cast in supporting parts in period and ensemble pieces, often as a French-Canadian or bilingual character, and she makes those parts look lived-in rather than decorative. The limit is that ease can slide into the wallpaper. In John Crowley's Brooklyn (2015), where she plays Miss Fortini, we admired the film a good deal and did not single her out, which is a fair account of what the part asked of her. She is not an actor who makes a scene about herself. In a thin series that is a virtue. In a good film it can mean she is barely there.
We did not expect to look forward to anything in Crew Girl that happened on land, and we found ourselves waiting for Paré to come back, because hers were the only scenes in which two people seemed to know each other's tricks and be tired of them. That is a small thing to be good at and a rare one. Nobody has yet built a film around it. Someone should, and it need not involve boats.
Biography
Jessica Paré is a Canadian actress and singer. She was born on 5 December 1980 in Montreal, Quebec.
Paré appeared in the films Stardom (2000), Lost and Delirious (2001), Wicker Park (2004), Suck (2009), Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and Brooklyn (2015), in which she played Miss Fortini. She is known for her role as Megan Draper in the television series Mad Men (2010–2015) and as Mandy Ellis in SEAL Team (2017–2024), on which she has also directed episodes.
