Kate Mulgrew

Galina "Red" Reznikov runs the prison kitchen in Orange Is the New Black like a small country, and Kate Mulgrew plays her as a head of state who has read the intelligence reports. The voice is low, Russian and unhurried, and the threats arrive in the tone other people use for the menu. Nobody raises their voice to her twice.

We had her filed within a scene, and we were wrong. Jenji Kohan's series gives each inmate an episode that cuts back to how she got there, and when Red's turn came the past that Jennifer Hatton cut to was not the one we had written for her. It caught us out, and it should not have, because Mulgrew had been telling us all along that the certainty was a performance. That is the thing she does that other actors in these parts do not: the authority is real and the fear under it is real, and she shows us both while the people around her see only the first.

It took television a long time to work that out. She started on the daytime soap Ryan's Hope (1975) as Mary Ryan, then Mrs. Columbo, and spent years in parts that asked for the toughness and nothing else; the early dramatic work can be stiff, and the soap was slow to wash off. Star Trek: Voyager (1995) changed that. Seven seasons as Captain Kathryn Janeway, the first woman to run a starship as the lead of the franchise, taught her to carry a series and, on the evidence of what came after, to wait. What came after was steady guest and voice work and the stage, including Tea at Five (2002), a one-woman show in which she played Katharine Hepburn, a natural fit for an actor whose own voice is half the act. Then Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019), and a second audience that had never heard of Janeway.

Since then she has gone back to Janeway in the animated Star Trek: Prodigy and turned up as Theresa Bowers in Dope Thief (2025), in a regional American accent we would not have guessed was hers. Our review of that series did not stop to mention her. That is partly praise, since she fits, and partly a note that the part gives her little to fit into. The pattern in the casting is the limit as well as the strength: she is always the one in charge, and the interesting question is what the writers let the charge cost her. Kohan let it cost plenty. Most do not.

She has said of the move from bridge to kitchen that "It’s tough to be the captain of a starship and then a prison cook." We would put it the other way. The cook is the part we would point a newcomer at first, and the actor who could see that was the one worth hiring.