Kat Dennings

In the desert half of Thor (2011) a god is standing in the road and Kat Dennings, as the intern Darcy Lewis, is the one person looking at him as though he were a problem with the van. Everyone else is awed, or worried, or falling in love. Dennings is holding a taser and asking a sensible question. She gets the good lines, as we said at the time, and she says them without leaning on them, in the voice of someone who knows the joke is on everybody else and would rather not make a fuss about it.

That is the Dennings manner, and she arrived with it. She was in commercials at nine and on screen at fourteen in Sex and the City (2000), had a small part as Marla in Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), and was given the lead in Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008), an indie romantic comedy that let her do the deadpan at length. Then 2011 handed her two jobs at once: Darcy, and Max Black, the sharp-tongued waitress of 2 Broke Girls, which ran until 2017 under Michael Patrick King with Beth Behrs across the counter. Darcy came back for the Thor sequels and for WandaVision (2021), where the intern had somehow become an astrophysicist, and the sitcoms kept coming: Dollface (2019–2022) and now Shifting Gears (2025–).

What works is the timing. Dennings can land a line a beat late and make the lateness the joke, and she improvises well enough that The 40-Year-Old Virgin is still cited for it. What does not work is the sameness. Coverage of 2 Broke Girls and of the films has said, more or less politely, that she has played the same sarcastic outsider for twenty years, and we would not argue. Three films alongside Natalie Portman have given her the same job each time, which is to stand a little behind the heroine and puncture things.

We were glad of her in Thor, and we should say why. The Earth scenes are three streets, a diner and a romance written in an afternoon, and Dennings is the only person in them who seems to have noticed; every time she wandered back into frame we relaxed a little, because somebody was finally going to say what we were thinking. That is a useful thing for an actor to be. It is also, after fourteen years, a small one.

She has said of Darcy that she "was originally, like, two scenes, and she was literally just an intern, just there to kind of bounce off other people." It is a fair account of how the part was written and a fairer one of how Dennings has been used since. Whether anyone will hand her a scene with nobody to bounce off and nothing to be dry about is the one open question about her. We would watch to find out.