Robin Wright is good at showing what a woman wants without having her explain it. We rate her quietness, but The Girlfriend also finds the comedy in her ability to sound certain long after certainty has become unreasonable.
Fi1m perspective
In Here (2024), Robin Wright makes us notice Margaret looking towards the door. Her character wants something the house cannot give her, and Wright makes that clear while the dialogue struggles to do so. It is the strongest reason to persist with Robert Zemeckis's otherwise thin experiment in keeping a camera in one living room. The de-aged faces and the explanatory dialogue are still hard work.
Her early film roles already exposed that difficulty. Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987) remains an easy recommendation, but Buttercup gets fewer opportunities than the companions around her, and Wright cannot make the central romance as interesting as the adventures. In Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (1994), she gives Jenny Curran enough emotional weight to challenge the script's preference for Forrest's reassuring view. Eric Roth's screenplay treats Forrest's lack of curiosity as a virtue, while Jenny's efforts to change her life become reasons to doubt her. Wright gives us someone worth taking seriously even when the writing seems determined to discourage it.
House of Cards (2013–2018), with Wright as Claire Underwood, made her skill at playing authority central to a leading role. Her restraint suited a woman whose motives could be hard to read. She also began directing episodes of the series, before directing for Ozark in 2022. By The Girlfriend (2025), she was directing as well as starring.
As Laura Sanderson, she treats her son's girlfriend as a problem she has already understood and expects everyone else to accept her judgement. We were surprised by how much we laughed at her possessiveness, because Wright leaves so little space in Laura's certainty for her son to have an opinion. Directing alongside Andrea Harkin, she keeps the hostility entertaining even as the behaviour becomes harder to believe. The performances sustain the series longer than its mystery deserves, though the escalating melodrama makes the women less interesting. Choose it for Wright being forceful and funny, provided a family feud is enough for the evening.
Biography
Robin Wright is an American actress, director and producer. Born on 8 April 1966 in Dallas, Texas, she began her career as a model before moving into acting with a role on the soap opera Santa Barbara (1984). She has also been credited as Robin Wright Penn.
Her film roles include Jenny Curran in Forrest Gump (1994), Buttercup in The Princess Bride (1987) and Margaret in Here (2024). On television she played Claire Underwood in House of Cards and has appeared in series such as Santa Barbara.
Wright has directed episodes of House of Cards and Ozark, as well as the film Land (2021). For the miniseries The Girlfriend (2025) she directed, produced and starred as Laura Sanderson.
