Kirby Howell-Baptiste is the colleague who is cleverer than the hero and kinder than the script requires, and television keeps casting her as exactly that. She is good at it. She has rarely been given enough of it to do.
Fi1m perspective
In Sugar (2024) she sits in front of screens. Ruby is the handler, the colleague, the one who knows what Colin Farrell's detective is and would rather he did not find out, and for eight episodes Kirby Howell-Baptiste plays that knowledge with a slight frown and very few lines that let her enjoy herself. She has described the part herself: "Ruby is to Sugar what M is to James Bond." That is an accurate summary of the role, and of most of the roles she has had.
She started at the Anna Scher Theatre in London, moved to Los Angeles around 2012 and learnt comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade, which shows. After Downward Dog (2017) came the year in which everything arrived at once: Elena in the first season of Killing Eve (2018), Sasha in Barry (2018), and Simone Garnett, the neuroscientist, in the last two seasons of The Good Place (2018). Since then the work has moved towards genre, with Anita Darling in Cruella (2021) and Death in The Sandman (2022). She has been credited simply as Kirby since 2023.
What critics notice, consistently, is the same thing in different clothes. She is the friend who tells the truth, the competent one beside the eccentric or the closed-off one, warm without being soft and dry without being cold. In the ensemble comedies that made her name she was the person the joke bounced off, and she worked with Kristen Bell three times and with Bill Hader on Barry, which is good company for learning how to hold a straight face. In The Sandman the same warmth is turned to a different purpose, and it is the quality people mention first.
The trouble is what happens when a writer decides that competence is the whole character. We scored Sugar 58, and she is part of why. She has to carry the series' secret in every scene and is asked to do it mostly by looking worried at a monitor, while Amy Ryan gets the car and the conversations. We felt for her, honestly, because we have seen her be quick and funny opposite Bell and Hader and here she is handed a screen and told to be anxious at it. The reviews of We Strangers (2024) raised the same complaint, that the part under-serves the player, and it is starting to look like a pattern rather than bad luck.
So far the case for her rests on what she does in the corner of other people's shows, and it is a good case. Somebody should now write her the lead, or at least a second lead with a joke in it. Until they do, the thing to watch for is the moment in any ensemble when the hero says something foolish and she is the one who does not let it pass.
Biography
Kirby Howell-Baptiste, also credited mononymously as Kirby since 2023, is an English actress. She began acting at the Anna Scher Theatre in London and trained further at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in Los Angeles.
She has appeared as a series regular in Downward Dog (2017), Killing Eve (2018), Why Women Kill (2019) and Sugar (2024), and played Death of the Endless in The Sandman (2022–2025) and Dead Boy Detectives (2024). Recurring roles include those in Love (2016–2018), Barry (2018–2023) and The Good Place (2018–2020). Film credits include A Dog's Purpose (2017) and Cruella (2021).
