Erica Durance plays women who arrive unimpressed by everyone they meet, and for seven seasons on Smallville that was what the programme needed. She has since led a medical drama she produced, and gone back to Lois Lane once, in somebody else's programme.
Fi1m perspective
Watch how Erica Durance comes into a scene in Smallville. Everyone else in Kansas is standing still and looking worried, and she arrives talking, usually about herself and usually at Clark, without checking whether anyone wants to hear it. It is a small trick. She did it for seven seasons and it never wore out on us, because the programme by then had settled into Clark putting off his choices while everyone waited for him to make them, and here was somebody who had not been told to wait.
She came to the part in 2004 as a recurring guest, was made a regular from the fifth season and stayed to the finale in 2011. We called her arrival a jolt of energy and we stand by it: brash, funny, unimpressed by everyone, she played Lois Lane as a woman who had walked into the wrong programme and decided to run it anyway. What people noticed at the time was how she worked against Tom Welling, and they were right to. She talks, he waits, and that is the joke. We were glad every time she appeared, and the reason is plain: for four seasons the programme had treated Clark Kent as a mystery, and she was the first person on it to be unimpressed by him.
Before that there was the usual apprenticeship, background work and commercials, guest spots in Andromeda, Stargate SG-1 and Tru Calling, and a horror film for Uwe Boll, House of the Dead (2003), under a different surname. After it came Saving Hope (2012–2017), five seasons as Dr Alex Reid, which she also produced and once directed. We have not reviewed it and will not pretend to have weighed it, but carrying a medical drama that long while producing it is not nothing. Since then she has been Kara's Kryptonian mother in Supergirl (2017–2019), played her own Lois again in the 2019 Batwoman crossover, and made a run of television films for Hallmark and Lifetime, with guest turns in Tracker and Murder in a Small Town in 2024.
The trick has a limit, and it is worth naming. A performer whose best note is not being impressed needs someone on screen worth not being impressed by, and Welling gave her that for seven years. Whether anyone has since, we cannot say, because we have not reviewed enough of the later work to judge it, and the parts, on paper, have been smaller.
"It's more fun to tell the origin part of the story," she has said of Lois, and her Lois is exactly that: the woman before the byline, before anyone knew who she would become. Start with her first season on Smallville, when the programme most needed her. She spent seven years playing the beginning of a famous woman. We would like to see her play the whole of an unfamous one.
Biography
Erica Durance is a Canadian actress. She was born on 21 June 1978 in Calgary, Alberta, and moved to Vancouver in 1999 to pursue acting professionally. She trained at the Yaletown Actors Lab and began her career with commercials and background work, later taking guest roles in series including Andromeda (2000), Stargate SG-1 (1997) and Tru Calling (2003).
Durance is known for portraying Lois Lane in the series Smallville (2001), appearing in a recurring capacity from 2004 and as a series regular from 2005 to 2011. She played Dr Alex Reid in the medical drama Saving Hope (2012–2017). Other credits include House of the Dead (2003), The Butterfly Effect 2 (2006) and guest appearances in Private Eyes (2016) and Batwoman (2019).
