Rhianne Barreto

Watch Rani in The Outlaws (2021) when the scene belongs to someone else. Barreto gives her a brightness that keeps curdling into something angrier, and most of that curdling happens in close-up, in the half-second after she has heard something she did not want to hear. She does not announce it. She lets the face change and waits for us to notice. It is a small habit and it is the thing she does that most of the cast around her does not.

She has been working since 2016, in guest parts and then recurring ones: the CBBC web series Dixi (2017), Little Boy Blue (2017), Strike Back (2018) and Hanna (2019), where she played Sophie. The turn came the same year with Share (2019), Pippa Bianco's first feature, in which she carried the lead as Mandy Lundy and critics began to notice how much she could do with very little dialogue. Since then the parts have been larger and more central: Bekhal Mahmod in the miniseries Honour (2020), Rani Rekowski across three series of Stephen Merchant's The Outlaws (2021–2024), and Kitty in No Escape (2023). We have not reviewed the rest, so we will keep our judgement to the one we have.

The Outlaws is warm, well cast and funny in bursts, and it loses its nerve when the guns come out. Barreto is one of the reasons the first of those is true. Rani starts as a type the British television viewer will know, the clever daughter of strict parents, and Barreto has been candid about the trap in that; she has said of the character that "if you're isolated with really intense parents, you find a way to rebel." What she does with it is let the rebellion arrive slowly, so that by the time Rani does something reckless we have already seen it coming in her face for several episodes. We were more unsettled by that slow turn than by anything the plot did with a firearm, and we think that is to her credit and slightly to the show's cost.

She holds her own in a large ensemble without raising her voice to do it, which is rarer than it sounds; Jessica Gunning and Christopher Walken are both louder presences and she never disappears beside them. The pattern across her credits so far is young women under pressure from family, from trauma, from the group they have landed in, and she has played it enough times that the next interesting move is away from it. The question is whether someone writes her a part built for the stillness, rather than one she has to make room for it in.