Alison Sudol

In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), a dinner assembles itself in mid-air and Queenie Goldstein reads the mind of the man across the table. He is Jacob, a cannery worker with no magic who has just been refused the loan for his bakery, and she is a witch who reads minds and is bored by most of them. Alison Sudol plays the moment as tenderness rather than a trick: a woman who has heard everyone and has finally found one head worth listening to. That is her method in a sentence. She is quiet, she watches, and she lets the other actor be the interesting one, which is harder than it looks.

She came to acting sideways, from music, with three albums as A Fine Frenzy between 2007 and 2012 and then recurring television work in Transparent (2014) and Dig (2015). David Yates cast her as the younger Goldstein sister opposite Katherine Waterston, and three films followed, in 2016, 2018 and 2022. The part is what she is known for and, for now, almost the only thing. Colleen Atwood dressed Queenie in pink silk nobody on her wages could afford, and Sudol wears it lightly, as if Queenie picked it out herself and knows exactly what it says.

Her best work is with Dan Fogler. In the first film the two of them are the reason to stay, and a late scene between them, which we will not describe, was the only point at which we felt a lump in the throat; it had nothing to do with the wizard plot and everything to do with two people who like each other and know the odds. The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) is a worse film, forever stopping to check its own family trees, and Sudol and Fogler again carry what feeling it has. The script also sends Queenie somewhere we will not describe. Sudol has said it took her a long while to understand how the character got there. We had the same trouble, and a film that never gets going does not have the minutes to spend earning it.

The limit is not in the acting but in the offers. Since the third film her screen work has been small, Bonus Track (2023) among it, and the parts that come her way tend to be the warm, intuitive woman at the edge of somebody else's story. She is good at that; Queenie proves it three times over. The danger is that it becomes the whole job, and that we spend another decade praising how kindly she listens. We would like to see her given a room of her own and something unkind to say in it.