Jodi Balfour plays the woman at the edge of the frame who asks for nothing, and she is at her best when a part gives her years to grow into and least sure when a script makes her explain herself.
Fi1m perspective
In For All Mankind (2019), Ellen Wilson is handed a suit cut for someone else's body and an instructor who would like her to fail, and Balfour takes both without asking us to feel for her. That is her habit. In The Sinking of the Laconia (2011), as Sarah Fullwood, she is the daughter of Lindsay Duncan's Elisabeth, the broadest figure in Alan Bleasdale's drama, and Balfour has the plainer part and the better one: more to do, done quietly. Two parts, eight years apart, and the same method. She lets other people make the noise.
The career has been mostly television and mostly recurring. She trained in theatre in Cape Town, moved to Canada around 2010 for guest parts in series like Sanctuary and Supernatural, and broke through as Gladys Witham in Bomb Girls (2012–2013), a wartime home-front drama. Then came Quarry (2016), the reverse-chronology thriller Rellik (2017) opposite Richard Dormer, a single episode of The Crown (2017) as Jackie Kennedy, the third season of True Detective (2019) and, as Jack Danvers, the third season of Ted Lasso (2023). Ronald D. Moore's For All Mankind is the one that let her stay: a main role for three seasons, a character followed across almost four decades of her life.
That is where the method pays. The first season takes six episodes to find its footing, and when it does, the strongest thread is the women's programme, Balfour alongside Krys Marshall's Danielle Poole. We were more moved by those scenes than we expected to be, and it was because neither actor plays for it: the suits, the instructors, the tests designed to be failed, and two faces that get on with the job. Everything we later feel about Ellen Wilson is built on that refusal to perform her own hardship. The notices for Rellik, which we have not reviewed, found her stronger in its silent stretches than in its dialogue, and that fits what we have seen elsewhere. She is an actor of reaction before speech, and a script that needs her to talk her way through a scene is not using her well.
She has said of Jack Danvers that she could not feel further from the character, and that is the one thing we have not yet seen her do on screen: a part where the distance shows as effort. On the evidence we have, she does not reach. She waits, and the camera finds her when it is ready. Start For All Mankind and give it until the sixth episode; the women's programme is the reason to stay, and she is half of it.
Biography
Jodi Balfour is a South African actress. She grew up in Cape Town and studied drama at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 2009.
She is known for her role as Gladys Witham in the Canadian series Bomb Girls (2012–2013) and the follow-up television film Bomb Girls: Facing the Enemy (2014), for which she won a Canadian Screen Award. Balfour has also appeared in The Crown (2017) as Jackie Kennedy, Quarry (2016), Ted Lasso (2023) as Jack Danvers, and as Ellen Wilson in the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind (2019–2023).
