10 Underrated Actresses Playing Hollywood’s Most Complicated Characters

The formidable actresses we should all be talking about

By: The Lace Ledger Staff

There is something compelling about watching an actress disappear into a character we’re not entirely sure we should root for. These are the disrupters: actresses willing to inhabit characters who are damaged without making them helpless; dangerous without stripping away their humanity. They find beauty inside ugly stories without sanding down the edges that made them uncomfortable in the first place.

Their work makes space for women to be contradictory and occasionally difficult to love—and infinitely more interesting because of it.

From established actresses whose range deserves greater recognition to emerging talent already pushing at the boundaries, these are 10 dark feminine badasses we cannot shut up about.

TLL Top Billing: Emmy Rossum

Furious

Shameless

Beautiful Creatures

The Phantom of the Opera

Known for: Furious, Shameless, Beautiful Creatures,The Phantom of the Opera, Angelyne, Mystic River, and The Day After Tomorrow.

Awards: Critics’ Choice Award nominee for Shameless; Golden Globe nominee for The Phantom of the Opera, among numerous television and film nominations.

Disruptive Badassary:

In Furious, Rossum takes on a survivor story with little interest in making survival look falsely polished and perfect. Alice Black is simultaneously heroine and deeply traumatized woman. She is an accomplished FBI agent, yet her history of domestic violence has profoundly affected her relationship with intimacy and left its mark on the way she responds to violence, impacting her approach to her work. Even her relationship with her own body bears the consequences of what she survived. The result is bold work that shines a light on domestic abuse and human trafficking without reducing the women affected by either to victims—or pretending survival leaves them unscathed.

Early in her career Rossum went from a classically trained singer playing one of musical theatre’s great ingénues to spending nine seasons making Fiona Gallagher ferocious, provacative, funny and painfully human. She followed Fiona with another woman determined to survive on her own terms, transforming herself for Angelyne while executive-producing the unconventional limited series.

Her impact extends behind the camera. Rossum directed episodes of Shameless and Animal Kingdom, has increasingly taken producing roles and famously held out during Shameless contract negotiations after years of William H. Macy earning more, ultimately securing pay parity.

Rossum could easily have remained within the polished leading-lady lane established early in her career. Instead, she has consistently sought out characters that become measurable more interesting when empowered to get messy.

Delainey Hayles

Scene Stealers: 10 Underrated On-Screen Dark Feminine Badasses by The Lace Ledger — Photo Credit: IMDb

Known for:Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, alongside stage work including The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in London.

Disruptive Badassary: Taking over Claudia—a character audiences had already become deeply attached to—could have been an impossible assignment, but Hayles arrived with enough fury and emotional precision to make the role her own. We have the priveledge of catching her at the beginning of her career: an expansive dark-feminine powerhouse résumé hasn’t been built yet, but the talent is already very much there.

Lily-Rose Depp

Known for:The King, Voyagers, The Idol and Nosferatu.

Awards: César Award nominee for Most Promising Actress for The Dancer and A Faithful Man.

Disruptive Badassary: Depp entered acting carrying two assumptions capable of eclipsing talent before anyone bothered looking for it: A-list famous parents and a high-fashion face. Then Nosferatu asked her to make beauty grotesque, delivering the kind of fearless performance that makes the “nepo baby” shorthand feel increasingly inadequate.

Amber Midthunder

Known for: Legion, Roswell, New Mexico, Prey, Rez Ball, Opus, Novocaine, Carrie and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

Awards: Critics Choice Super Award winner for Best Actress in a Science Fiction/Fantasy Movie for Prey.

Disruptive Badassary: Prey handed Midthunder a decades-old action franchise and she carried it without Naru becoming reduced to somebody’s love interest or supporting player. The physicality behind that performance wasn't entirely manufactured for Hollywood, either. Midthunder trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu from childhood into high school, later teaching the discipline herself and seriously considering a career in MMA. For Prey, she added intensive stunt and weapons training to that foundation, making her emergence as an Indigenous female action hero feel particularly potent.

Hunter Schafer

Known for: Euphoria, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Cuckoo, Kinds of Kindness and Mother Mary.

Disruptive Badassery: Schafer moved from high fashion into Euphoria with no previous professional acting experience and promptly helped bring a trans teenage girl into the centre of one of television’s defining cultural phenomena. At a time when trans characters were still rarely given that degree of complexity or visibility, Jules was allowed to be desirable and difficult, with Schafer helping create a character whose transness mattered without becoming the only thing that mattered about her.

Ruth Negga

Known for:Breakfast on Pluto, Love/Hate, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Loving, Preacher, Ad Astra, Passing and Presumed Innocent.

Awards: Academy Award, Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice nominee for Loving; Tony Award nominee for Macbeth.

Disruptive Badassary: Negga can make restraint devastating in Loving, then turn around and play Preacher’s Tulip O’Hare with finesse, violence and wicked comic timing. Her résumé across screen and stage makes the lingering gap between her critical reputation and household-name status impossible to justify.

Gwendoline Christie

Known for:Game of Thrones,The Sandman, Wednesday, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Awards: Emmy Award nominee for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for Game of Thrones.

Disruptive badassary: At 6'3", Christie entered an industry with narrow ideas about what a female leading presence should look like. As Brienne of Tarth, she made physical strength integral to the character without allowing it to eclipse her vulnerability or desire to be loved. As Lucifer in The Sandman, Christie transformed that imposing presence into something ethereal and commanding, while Wednesday gave her the opportunity to embrace old-school screen glamour as Larissa Weems. Rather than conforming to Hollywood’s template, Christie has demonstrated just how expansive female screen presence can be.

Jurnee Smollett

Known for:Eve’s Bayou, Friday Night Lights, True Blood, Underground, Lovecraft Country, Birds of Prey, The Burial, The Order and Smoke.

Awards: Critics Choice Super Award winner for Lovecraft Country; multiple NAACP Image Award wins and nominations across her career.

Disruptive Badassary: Smollett delivered a remarkable performance in Eve’s Bayou before she was old enough to drive, and has spent the decades since refusing to settle into a single genre or type. She brings intelligence and force to complex roles, while expanding her influence behind the camera as an executive producer.

Devery Jacobs

Known for:Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Reservation Dogs, Echo and Backspot.

Awards: Critics Choice Television Award winner as part of the Reservation Dogs ensemble; Canadian Screen Award and Independent Spirit Award nominee.

Disruptive Badassary: Jacobs has expanded from formidable performer into writer, director and producer, establishing herself as a creative force on both sides of the camera. That growing authorship has allowed her to take on increasingly ambitious work while also helping create greater visibility and opportunity for Indigenous women across mainstream film and television.

Abbey Lee

Known for:Mad Max: Fury Road, The Neon Demon, Elizabeth Harvest, Lovecraft Country, Old, Waco: The Aftermath, Florida Man and Black Rabbit.

Disruptive Badassary: Lee could have built an acting career around looking spectacular on camera; instead, she keeps gravitating toward horror and psychologically strange women who weaponize the face that made her a supermodel. She’s one of the strongest rebuttals to the assumption that “model turned actor” means acting is an afterthought.

Perhaps we’re drawn to complicated characters onscreen because they feel a little closer to real life? We make questionable decisions. We change our minds. Sometimes we get hurt and carry the evidence forward. There is no requirement to smooth those rough edges, and certainly no reason to squeeze ourselves into somebody else’s mould, on screen or off it.

For our millennial readers, as Meredith Grey put it, “Smooth rides make for boring stories. A little calamity, now that’s worth talking about.” We’re grateful for the actresses who bring that complexity to the screen, giving Hollywood heroines enough mess and humanity for the rest of us to recognize ourselves in.

Who would you add to the list?

Tell us in the comments and subscribe to receive our free monthly digital issue to your inbox including a first look at dark feminine style and culture, the chance to vote on next month’s stories and a preview of upcoming giveaways.

***All imagery from IMDb***

Scene Stealers: 10 Underrated On-Screen Dark Feminine Badasses