20 Underused Actors We Hope to See Break Out in 2017

John Noble, Joshua Jackson, and Anna Torv in Fringe season 2, image courtesy of Fox

16. Anna Torv

Why you should know her: Torv had a major role in the celebrated Australian TV drama The Secret Life of Us, which also featured Joel Edgerton and Ben Mendelsohn at different points. But in the U.S., she’s most famous for Fox’s science-fiction series Fringe.

At first, Fringe made no secret of its X-Files influence, and it looked like Torv, as FBI agent Olivia Dunham, would be stuck playing the straight-faced skeptic to John Noble’s mad scientist Walter Bishop and Joshua Jackson’s charismatic conman Peter. As the show went on, though, it delved deeper into its mythology and characters, enabling the actors to stretch. Torv in particular was marvelous to watch – and not just because she played doppelgängers without using any of the ostentatious quirks and elaborate make-up that Tatiana Maslany (as brilliant as she is) has in Orphan Black.

Every aspect of her performance, from her slightly stiff posture to her crisp line delivery, reflects her character’s traumatic past; she even plays the rare moments when Olivia lets down her guard with subtlety (see the haunting episode “Marionette”). It never feels affected, though. In an ideal world, Torv would be a certifiable action star by now. She’s badass and she can actually act.

Upcoming projects: Four years after Fringe ended, Torv finally got another lead role in a show, the David Fincher-produced crime procedural Mindhunter, which is slated to premiere on Netflix sometime in 2017.