Natalie Morales

In No Hard Feelings (2023), Natalie Morales’s Sara has a familiar supporting player’s assignment: tell Jennifer Lawrence’s Maddie what she is doing wrong. Alongside Scott MacArthur, she plays a friend whom the script gives little else to do. We were frustrated by how narrowly the writing confined them to correcting Maddie. Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman make a likeable pair, but there is room here for friends who have something to contribute beyond advice.

The earlier television work makes clear that she need not be restricted to that job. She broke through as Wendy Watson, the lead in The Middleman (2008), before recurring parts in Parks and Recreation and The Grinder. Her useful habits are physical timing and deadpan delivery, often in parts that call for a grounded, practical woman. We like the restraint, though being reliably sensible can leave an actor waiting for everyone else to finish behaving badly.

The turn towards directing in 2021 also gives us something to consider about her acting. Plan B (2021) was her feature directorial debut, while Language Lessons (2021) gave her the role of Cariño and a co-writing partnership with co-star Mark Duplass. The latter uses a screenlife format for an intimate two-hander, bringing the emphasis back to the exchange between performers. That smaller arrangement offers more scope for her to participate than the corrective lines she gets in No Hard Feelings.

She plays Shelley Morris in the eight-part thriller The Beast in Me (2025), led by Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. We found enough tension in their performances to stay with a familiar setup, but eight episodes give the writing too much time to repeat itself. That makes it a qualified recommendation; it is hardly the obvious starting point for Morales’s work. To see her with more responsibility for what gets said, start with Language Lessons and her collaboration with Duplass.