Vanessa Kirby can make a look establish who is in charge. We value that quiet authority, especially when a film gives her more to do than lend conviction to an underwritten part.
Fi1m perspective
The other three defer to Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm in The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025), and the reason is easy to see. She runs the household and conducts the diplomacy as though separating them would waste time. Matt Shakman gives her a family whose members behave as though they know one another, and she makes their reliance on Sue convincing. We rate Kirby most when this watchfulness has a practical purpose: she can establish who makes the decisions without making a scene of it.
Her breakthrough as Princess Margaret in The Crown (2016–2017) was followed by a move into action as the White Widow in Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018). By Pieces of a Woman (2020), she was carrying a leading dramatic role, including a 23-minute single-take birth scene. The White Widow returned in Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), still dressed in white by Jill Taylor. Moving between these parts has given her different demands to meet, though the writing has not always kept up.
In Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023), her Josephine measures out her attention to Joaquin Phoenix’s emperor, knowing how readily he will obey her. We missed her whenever the film left her for a battle, because those calculations made the conversations more absorbing than the fighting. Editors Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo hurry through the years, while Kirby gives the marriage time to register. Composer Martin Phipps is more effective in the quiet cues beneath her scenes than in the insistent choir and drums elsewhere.
The Son (2022) shows the limit of what she can repair. As Beth, alongside Laura Dern’s Kate, she briefly makes stiff dialogue sound human, but Florian Zeller’s film gives neither actor enough to sustain it. We would not recommend a shallow drama simply because she brings some feeling to it. Casting her is no substitute for writing her a part.
For a fuller use of her, start with The Fantastic 4: First Steps. Shakman lets her be capable and warm, and the shared domestic life gives her decisions weight. The threat to the planet is less persuasive; go for the people trying to run a household underneath it. Fi1m
Biography
Vanessa Kirby is an English actress. She made her professional stage debut in 2010 and appeared in productions including All My Sons, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Women Beware Women, Three Sisters and A Streetcar Named Desire.
She rose to prominence playing Princess Margaret in the Netflix series The Crown (2016–2017), for which she won a BAFTA Award. Her film roles include Joanna in About Time (2013), The White Widow in Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018) and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), Josephine Bonaparte in Napoleon (2023), and Sue Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025). For her performance in Pieces of a Woman (2020) she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress and received an Academy Award nomination.
