Gillian Jacobs

Britta Perry says something she believes at the study table, the rest of the group groans, and Gillian Jacobs does not flinch. That is the thing she does. Where another actor would let the character shrink, Jacobs squares her shoulders and carries on, wrong and sincere and unembarrassed. Britta began Community (2009) as the love interest and was written, season by season, into the group's designated failure, and Jacobs took the demotion gamely. Being the person the others laugh at is harder than being the one with the jokes, because the script keeps taking the character's dignity and the actor has to keep handing it back, and she managed it for six seasons.

Comedy was not the plan. She trained at Juilliard and spent her first years in serious independent films and guest television parts, and by her own account she "was tired of doing really heavy, serious dramas". Dan Harmon's programme settled that. After it came a recurring part in Girls (2015) as Mimi-Rose Howard, then the lead in Love (2016–2018), produced by Judd Apatow, as Mickey Dobbs, another woman who is difficult to be near and difficult to give up on, and Don't Think Twice (2016), an ensemble film about improvisers in which she plays Sam. We have not reviewed those, but they sit where you would expect: flawed, idealistic, neurotic, hard to like and, in her hands, liked anyway.

The habit is what she is best at, and it is also what she keeps being asked for. Jacobs is good at letting us see, half a second before the punchline lands on her, that the character believes she is helping. We laughed at Britta more than felt quite decent, and it was that half-second that did it: the joke is on her and she has just enough time not to know it. The criticism that follows her is that she is cast as the misfit again and again, and it is fair as far as it goes. She has not often been asked to be the still centre of anything.

Recent work looks like a way out. There is horror in the Fear Street trilogy (2021), voice parts in Invincible and Rick and Morty, shorts she has directed herself, and a recurring role as Tiffany Jerimovich in Christopher Storer's The Bear (2022). She has spent a decade being the woman the table groans at. We would like to see what she does in a scene where nobody is laughing.