Ashleigh Murray's trick, as Hazel in The Other Black Girl, is to play ambition as warmth, so that we like her and distrust her in the same scene. Before that she spent years singing confidently in teenage television; she is more interesting when unreadable.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Hazel does when she arrives at Wagner Books in The Other Black Girl (2023). She wears her locs with pride, speaks to Vera Parini (Bellamy Young) as an equal from the first meeting, and before long has a column written about the firm's new commitment to diversity. Nella (Sinclair Daniel) has spent two years learning to smile through things; Hazel does not seem to need the lesson. Ashleigh Murray plays all this warmly, and the warmth is the point: we liked Hazel, we wanted her to be Nella's friend, and by the middle of the run we were watching every kindness she offered and wondering what it was for. The series is foggier than it should be about the conspiracy underneath, but Murray is not the fog. She is the one thing in it that stays sharp.
Before Hazel, Murray spent most of a decade playing confidence rather than doubt. After small parts in The Following (2014) and Younger (2016), she became Josie McCoy in Riverdale (2017–2019), lead singer of Josie and the Pussycats, doing her own singing, and went back to the part for the spin-off Katy Keene (2020), which moved Josie to New York and out of school. Both come from Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's stable, and both cast her the same way: the ambitious young woman in a room built for performance, assertive, usually right. The complaint in the early Riverdale years was that Josie was given too little to do, and it is a fair one. Alongside came Deidra & Laney Rob a Train (2017), her first substantial film part, Valley Girl (2020) and Tom Swift (2022). We have not reviewed them and will not pretend to a view.
What The Other Black Girl shows is that the confidence works best when something is hidden behind it. Zakiya Dalila Harris and Rashida Jones have written Hazel as a woman who is simply better at the game than Nella has ever let herself be, and Murray never lets us catch her enjoying the game, which is what makes her frightening and likeable at once. The show's later episodes lose their grip on tone and pace, and she is at their mercy; a performance built on ambiguity can only do so much when the scripts stop being sure what the ambiguity is for.
That is still one proper part, and we would like a second before we say much more. The pattern so far is a performer good at being liked who turns out to be better at being doubted. Somebody should write her a character nobody is meant to trust and see what she does with the quiet.
Biography
Ashleigh Murray is an American actress and singer. She trained at the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, graduating in 2009.
She is known for playing Josie McCoy in the series Riverdale (2017–2023) and its spin-off Katy Keene (2020). Her other credits include the films Deidra & Laney Rob a Train (2017) and Valley Girl (2020), the series Tom Swift (2022) and the role of Hazel in The Other Black Girl (2023).
