Miriam Shor

Watch Yitzhak in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) for a minute before anyone tells you who is playing him. A sullen Croatian-Jewish ex-drag queen, Hedwig's husband and backing singer, built out of a wig, a bad mood and a costume that has given up, and underneath it a woman from Minneapolis who had played the part off-Broadway for two years before John Cameron Mitchell put it on film. We spent the opening stretch of the film unsure what we were looking at and then stopped minding, because the scowl was so complete that the question no longer mattered. That is what she does: she commits to the surface so hard that the person underneath arrives as a surprise.

The years after Hedwig were a long apprenticeship in other people's cancelled sitcoms. Then Came You, Inside Schwartz, Big Day (2006), Swingtown (2008) and GCB (2012) each gave her a season or less, and there were guest spots, among them Gwen Waters on My Name Is Earl, a series we liked and whose review does not mention her, which is the lot of a guest in a sitcom that busy. Then Younger arrived in 2015 and kept her for seven seasons as Diana Trout, a marketing executive who starts as the demanding boss and is allowed, slowly, to become somebody. She directed two episodes along the way. Around and after it the parts have been smaller and often better: Erica Haskard in the final season of The Americans (2018), a run on Jessica Jones, Paula Baderman in American Fiction (2023), the alien Recorder Vim in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023), and Helen, Rhea Seehorn's wife and manager, in Vince Gilligan's Pluribus (2025).

The parts have a shape. Shor is sent on as the sharp professional woman, the one with the authority and the quick tongue, and she plays the authority straight; she does not wink at it or ask to be liked. Then, when the script allows, she lets something give. On Younger that took years. On Pluribus it takes a handful of scenes, and our own review, busy with Seehorn, did not stop to single her out, which says something about how little screen time she had and nothing about what she did with it. She has said she is an actor because she wants to play characters vastly different from herself, and the record bears it out: a man in a wig, an alien under prosthetics, a boss who apologises for nothing.

She has also started directing, with those two episodes of Younger and a documentary, My NDA, in 2026. The temptation for a viewer is to wait for the big part. Do not. The small ones are where she has done her best work, and the films and series around them, from Hedwig to Pluribus, have usually been worth the evening anyway.