Juliet Rylance plays the grown-up. Her Della Street in Perry Mason is the one person on screen behaving like an adult, and the programme knows it. What she has not yet had is a story built around her rather than beside her.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the office in Perry Mason. Matthew Rhys's Mason keeps his shoulders forward and his eyes down. John Lithgow's E.B. is vain in a way so gentle it takes a while to see the damage. Behind them, Juliet Rylance's Della Street gets on with the work. She is poised and she is articulate, and she spends both carefully; she is the only person on screen who behaves like an adult, and the programme is wise enough to notice. In a 1930s noir full of men who cannot quite stand up straight, that is not a small thing.
The poise comes from the stage. She trained at RADA and spent her first years in Shakespeare: Perdita and Cressida at the Globe, then Rosalind for Sam Mendes's Bridge Project. Screen came later and at first sideways, with a wife in the horror film Sinister (2012) opposite Ethan Hawke, then Cornelia Robertson in Steven Soderbergh's The Knick (2014–2015), American Gothic (2016) and McMafia (2018). Perry Mason (2020–2023) is the longest she has held a single part on screen, and the first time the part has been large enough to show what she does.
There is a pattern in what she is asked to play: capable women in periods that do not want them to be capable. Cornelia in The Knick and Della in Perry Mason are both ambitious and both hemmed in, and Rylance plays the ambition and the hemming at the same time, so the calm reads as effort rather than ease. That is what makes the calm worth watching. An actor who was simply serene would be furniture; she is a person keeping her temper.
We were glad of her every time she walked in. Everyone else in Perry Mason is a wreck of one sort or another, and after an hour of Rhys not meeting anyone's eye, a woman who behaves as if the rules still apply is a relief. It is also the limit of the part. The sensible one is the person the story moves around, not through, and Della is there to steady Mason rather than to be the case. Most of her screen work is television, and most of that is ensemble. Nobody has yet built a film on her.
The reviews so far contain no reservations about her at all, which is unusual and a little suspicious; it usually means nobody has asked an actor to do anything difficult enough to fail at. We would like to see her fail at something. Until then, Perry Mason is the place to start, and she is one of the reasons to stay.
Biography
Juliet Rylance, also credited as Juliet Van Kampen, is an English actress. Born in Hammersmith, London, in 1979, she is the daughter of composer Claire van Kampen and stepdaughter of actor Mark Rylance. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Rylance has worked extensively in theatre, film and television. Her stage credits include productions at Shakespeare's Globe, and she received an Obie Award for her performance as Rosalind in the Bridge Project's As You Like It. On screen, she is known for playing Cornelia Robertson in The Knick (2014–2015), Rebecca Harper in McMafia (2018) and Della Street in Perry Mason (2020–2023). Film roles include Sinister (2012), Frances Ha (2013), A Dog's Purpose (2017) and Arthur the King (2024). She has also produced projects such as Days and Nights (2014).
