Maria Sten

Watch her hands. In the second episode of Neagley (2026), after a corridor fight that is over in under a minute, the camera stays on Frances Neagley as she checks her own hands, and she flinches, once, at nothing. That flinch moved us more than we expected a Reacher spin-off to manage, because it is the first time in either series that violence has appeared to cost anyone anything. Sten has built the character around the fact that Neagley cannot bear to be touched, and she plays it not as a tic but as a posture: the body held very still so that nothing gets in.

She came to the part sideways. There was a lead in the horror anthology Channel Zero: The Dream Door (2018) and a main cast place in Swamp Thing (2019), and then the recurring role of Neagley in Reacher (2022–2025), where she was a presence at Alan Ritchson's elbow rather than a performance in her own right. The spin-off, run like its parent by Nick Santora, is where the presence became a performance, and a careful one. She also writes and directs short films of her own and wrote for Big Sky (2021), which may be why she so often seems to know what a scene is for before the script has decided.

Ritchson's Reacher enjoyed himself. Neagley does not, and Sten makes that the more interesting choice. When she does move, the violence has a plainness to it: no wisecrack, no lingering, a job done. Her best scenes in Neagley are with Adeline Rudolph's Renee, the only ones in which two people seem to be listening to each other. The trouble is what the writers think we need to know. Somewhere in every episode the case stops so that her past can be laid out, and Damon Herriman and Matthew Del Negro are given scenes whose only purpose is to tell us who she was before we met her. J. J. Geiger cuts these passages slowly, as if they were the point. Sten has already told us with her face, and we were bored, and a little cross about it.

She has said of preparing the role that "even though he didn't dive into her backstory in the books, I felt that she was so clear to me." The writers might have taken the hint. The series is at its best when it simply watches her hold still in a room full of people who want something from her, and we would trade every one of the scenes that explain her for another minute of her in that corridor, checking her hands.