Jane Levy

A sixteen-year-old stands on a lawn cut to the millimetre and narrates her own sentence. That is Tessa Altman in Suburgatory (2011), and it is the first thing most people saw Jane Levy do. Tessa is written as someone who has read a great deal and been to the suburbs never, and the danger is smugness; Levy never lets it in. She plays cleverness as a habit rather than a weapon, and she is watchful, so that when the joke lands you can see her decide whether it was worth making. We said at the time she was the reason to start the show, and we hold to it.

The career has two halves that ought not to fit. She had a recurring part as Mandy Milkovich in Shameless (2011), then three seasons as Tessa on a network sitcom that ran from 2011 to 2014 and, by our account, never found a second idea. Then she went into the dark. Evil Dead (2013), as Mia Allen, and Don't Breathe (2016), as Rocky, were both directed by Fede Álvarez, and both are the kind of horror that asks its lead to be hurt for ninety minutes and keep going. Television followed, in Castle Rock (2018), What/If (2019) and the title role of Zoey Clarke in Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist (2020–2021), along with independent films such as I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore (2017), in which she plays Dez. Whalefall (2026) is next.

The halves fit better than they look. What the notices on the Álvarez films dwell on is endurance and physical commitment, and what we noticed in Suburgatory was the same quality at sitcom volume: a girl who will not be moved from her position by a whole town of pink cardigans. Levy's toughness has always come with something soft underneath it, and it is the soft thing that catches you. The kitchen scenes with Jeremy Sisto, two people who like each other and have nobody else, moved us more than a half-hour comedy with a laugh a minute has any right to, and the quiet one at the end of the pilot, once the neighbours have gone home, had us a little choked. Nothing in it is big. She simply lets the face stop performing.

The recurring complaint about her work is not about her. Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist drew mixed notices on tone and execution while her performance was singled out, and Suburgatory went the same way on our own page: the show tired, she did not. That is a pattern to be wary of, because an actor who is always better than the material has usually been choosing material too kindly.

Of the horror work she has said, "There's perversity to me. Obviously, the genre is perverse, and it literally tickles me. It lights me up." We believe her. Start with the first season of Suburgatory, which is the one to watch, and then follow her into the Álvarez films with the lights off, on the understanding that we have yet to sit through those with a notebook.