Ashleigh Cummings

Kacey Fitzpatrick in Long Bright River (2025) is the sister the family has stopped expecting to hear from, an addict on the avenues of Kensington, and television has a shorthand for her: the twitch, the scratch, the stare at nothing. Ashleigh Cummings uses none of it. Her Kacey is quick, funny, affectionate and furious, often within the same scene, and in the flashbacks to the sisters' childhood you can see who she was before any of it happened. The series around her is a middling eight-episode murder mystery, and we scored it accordingly. She is the surprise in it, and the surprise is that there is no trick: she simply plays a person.

She has been doing this longer than her face suggests. Australian viewers knew her first as Robyn Mathers in Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010), then across two long television runs, as Debbie Vickers in Puberty Blues (2012–2014) and as Dot Williams alongside Essie Davis in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (2012–2015). The turn came with Ben Young's Hounds of Love (2016), in which she played Vicki Maloney, a girl held captive by a suburban couple, and the notice it drew carried her to America: Pippa in The Goldfinch (2019), Vic McQueen across two seasons of NOS4A2 (2019–2020), Abby Conroy in the spy series Citadel (2023–2026). Then Kacey.

What she brings is stillness. She trained in ballet from the age of two, and it shows in how little she moves when a scene is at its worst: the body held, the eyes doing the work. It is the quality people noticed in Hounds of Love, a captive calculating rather than screaming, and it is what makes Kacey legible in a crowd of people the camera barely pauses on. There is a passage in the first episode of Long Bright River in which Mickey holds up a photograph of Kacey to woman after woman on the avenue and each one shakes her head. Cummings is hardly in it, and it still got to us far more than we expected a procedural to manage, partly because of the writing and partly because she had already made Kacey someone worth looking for. The Philadelphia accent, worked up for the part, we did not notice once, which is what accent work is for.

The pattern is the worry. Abduction, addiction, haunting, espionage: the parts keep arriving with trauma attached, and she is good enough at them that she may keep being offered nothing else. We have reviewed only one of her performances, and it sits inside a series we could not quite recommend, so we hold our view loosely. But a woman who can play the written-off sister as funny deserves a comedy, or at least a part in which nobody is hunting her. Another series, Run, is due in 2026. We will be watching to see whether anyone has noticed what she can do when she is allowed to stand still.