Rebecca Romijn

Halfway through Femme Fatale (2002), Laure Ash undresses for a stranger in a bar while another man, Bardo, watches. Rebecca Romijn plays it without heat, competently, with an eye on the time: a woman doing the femme fatale as a job of work because the job requires it. That one scene is her whole method. She is good at being still, and better at the switch, the small change in the eyes when she has worked out what the person in front of her is for.

She came to acting from modelling, which she took up in 1991, and her first film parts were built around how she looked rather than what she said. Mystique in X-Men (2000) is the clearest case: blue paint, prosthetics, almost no lines, a character whose only trait is that she turns into other people. Romijn has said of it, "My call time was at midnight to be ready at 9 am. It was a nine-hour makeup process." She stayed with the part through X2 (2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), came back for a cameo in 2011, and made three films with Bryan Singer along the way. It is a franchise, not a performance, and it fixed her in most people's minds as a striking figure rather than an actor.

Brian De Palma saw more. He cast her as the lead in Femme Fatale, wrote the script himself, and opened on her in a hotel bed watching Double Indemnity, Barbara Stanwyck's face laid over her own in the glass of the television. The first twenty minutes are a near-silent heist, and she is the still centre of it. We had not expected to find her that hard to look away from, and we were faintly uncomfortable about it, which is exactly the effect De Palma was after. Olivier Bériot puts her in black leather and a trench coat, the wardrobe of the films Laure has plainly watched. When the script hands her a paragraph of plot to explain, she goes flat. Many found the plot overheated when the film came out; her performance was not the problem.

Nobody has given her a film like it since. There were supporting parts, The Punisher (2004) among them, and then television took her in: Ugly Betty (2006–2009), The Librarians (2014–2018), and Number One in Star Trek: Discovery (2019) and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022 onward). The pattern in these later roles is the competent woman in charge, the investigator or the officer, and it suits her. The switch in the eyes now belongs to someone giving orders instead of taking them. If you want to see what she can do, start with Femme Fatale, and watch her rather than listen to her.