Sonoya Mizuno

Sonoya Mizuno’s movement as Kyoko in Ex Machina (2015) is precise enough to hold our attention in a largely silent part. Her dance training gives her a way of expressing herself when the script provides few words. We found that near-silence unsettling, because the care in her movements makes us keep watching without bringing much reassurance. The reservation is simple: those early, minimally spoken supporting parts give us less of the actor than we would like.

Alex Garland’s thriller is tense and drily funny, with fine acting, though the screenplay explains too much and the plotting becomes foreseeable. Mizuno benefits from having relatively little of that explanatory dialogue: we have to attend to what she does. Alicia Vikander’s Ava gives the film someone to worry about, and Kyoko need not carry the same burden to be effective. We should be careful not to mistake a part with little dialogue for evidence that an actor has little else to offer.

In La La Land (2016), she plays Caitlin in another supporting part, this time for Damien Chazelle. The pleasure of romance becoming dance suits an actor whose physical expressiveness is so apparent elsewhere, although the evening belongs chiefly to Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. We recommend it for them, the songs and the affection between the leads; its thinly written characters remain a reservation. Caitlin offers less to assess than Kyoko, and our enthusiasm for the musical should not become indiscriminate praise for everyone in it.

Devs (2020) marks the important change: Lily Chan was her first lead, again with Garland, and the role required a sustained emotional and intellectual journey. Garland remains the central collaborator, with Annihilation (2018) and Civil War (2024) among their further work together. Mysaria in House of the Dragon (2022–) also gives her a recurring television role beyond his films and programmes. Start with Ex Machina for the physical precision, then try Devs to see what happens when she is given the lead.