Gayle Rankin is funny because she takes her outsiders’ difficulties with other people seriously. Her physical comedy can be unruly, but The Incomer shows an actor who knows when to leave room for somebody else.
Fi1m perspective
In The Incomer (2026), Gayle Rankin makes Isla’s resistance to change look like hard physical work. Ordinary company is difficult for this isolated woman, and Rankin puts that difficulty into the comedy rather than waiting for a good line. We laughed at her fierceness because keeping the outside world at a distance seems to take so much effort. There is a person worth watching here, even when the film overdoes the island eccentricity. We like Rankin’s ability to make someone so unruly belong in a shared scene.
Her breakthrough was Sheila the She-Wolf in GLOW (2017–2019), a role that made good use of her physical expressiveness and comic timing. Supporting parts in The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) and The Greatest Showman (2017) came during that rise. Emily Dodson, the grieving mother in Perry Mason (2020), offered a more directly dramatic role. By The Incomer, she was taking a lead role as Isla. She is often cast as a woman living outside ordinary social rules, though we would not want peculiarity to become the whole job description.
Louis Paxton’s island comedy shows why the company matters. Domhnall Gleeson’s Daniel is the visitor, while Grant O’Rourke’s Sandy is Isla’s brother, and Rankin’s physical comedy works within their awkward exchanges. Gleeson lets the discomfort linger; O’Rourke helps make the sibling bond convincing. Rankin has room to be fierce without turning either man into a prop. None of the three seems to be waiting for the others to finish so that the proper performance can begin.
The limitation is in Paxton’s writing, which too often relies on the islanders being peculiar. Rankin cannot make every laboured joke worth the trouble, and our affection for the performances does not erase that weakness. What does work is the attention to loneliness and belonging: her unruliness has something to do with how Isla lives, not simply how she looks to a visitor. That matters for an actor so often cast as an outsider. Start with The Incomer for the three performers, provided a little laboured eccentricity does not put you off.
Biography
Gayle Rankin is a Scottish actress. She was born on 1 August 1989 in Paisley and trained at the Juilliard School in New York, the first Scottish student to win a place there.
She is known for her role as Sheila the She-Wolf in the Netflix series GLOW (2017–2019), Emily Dodson in the HBO series Perry Mason (2020–2023), Alys Rivers in House of the Dragon (2024–), and Queen Victoria in the film The Greatest Showman (2017). Her other film credits include The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017), Irreplaceable You (2018), Blow the Man Down (2019), Worth (2021) and Men (2022).
On stage, Rankin has appeared in Broadway productions of Cabaret, earning a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 2024 for her performance as Sally Bowles. She is credited as Isla in the 2026 film The Incomer.
