Lizzy Caplan plays clever women who have worked out the joke before anyone else has. Given the centre of a scene, as in Masters of Sex, she is the reason to stay; left at the edge of one, she is wasted.
Fi1m perspective
Virginia Johnson tells William Masters that women sometimes pretend, and he stares at her as if she has reported a new element. That is the whole of Masters of Sex in one exchange, and it belongs to Lizzy Caplan. She does not play it as a revelation or a victory. She says it the way you would tell a colleague the photocopier is out of paper, and lets Michael Sheen do the staring. We laughed out loud when we first saw it, and then noticed the programme had just made its argument without raising its voice.
She had been doing a version of that for years before anyone gave her a scene to herself. Sara on Freaks and Geeks (1999–2000), Janis Ian in Mean Girls (2004), Casey Klein in Party Down (2009–2010, and again in 2023): the dark-haired friend at the side of the frame who sees through everything and gets the best lines for it. It was a good part and she was good in it, and it kept her in more or less the same part for the better part of a decade, with supporting work in bigger machines like Cloverfield (2008) and 127 Hours (2010) in between. Then Michelle Ashford's Masters of Sex (2013) put her opposite Sheen for four seasons, and the sarcasm turned out to have been intelligence all along.
What she does that other actors do not is play knowing without playing smug. Her Johnson walks into the hospital understanding more about the subject than the men studying it and is not offended by that; she stopped being offended some time ago and has work to do. Sheen is the right partner, a man who cannot stop being astonished, and that first season, two clever people in a basement counting heartbeats, is the best thing we have seen her in. On the comic side, Adam Scott is the one who gets the timing out of her, and their scenes together on Party Down are where it shows most clearly.
The weakness is less hers than the casting. Put her in a crowd and she goes quiet, because what she does is small and needs a scene pointed at it. Now You See Me 2 (2016) added her to the Horsemen as Lula, and Ruben Fleischer's Now You See Me: Now You Don't (2025) brings her back to stand among eight magicians and react while the script finds work for other people. She has said she is "only drawn to the messes", and the later television, Fleishman Is in Trouble (2022), Fatal Attraction (2023), Zero Day (2025), has gone looking for them.
See the first season of Masters of Sex and the Party Down run, and leave the magicians to the magicians. She is at her best when someone else in the scene is slow to understand something, and the director has the patience to let her wait.
Biography
Lizzy Caplan is an American actress. She made her acting debut in the television series Freaks and Geeks (1999–2000) and gained early notice with her role as Janis Ian in the film Mean Girls (2004).
Caplan is known for playing Virginia E. Johnson in the series Masters of Sex (2013–2016) and Libby Epstein in Fleishman Is in Trouble (2022), both of which earned her Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Her film roles include Cloverfield (2008), 127 Hours (2010), The Interview (2014), Now You See Me 2 (2016) and Now You See Me: Now You Don't (2025) as Lula May, and Allied (2016). She has also had series-regular roles in Party Down (2009–2010; 2023) and other television productions.
