Claire Danes

Danes broke through as a teenager on the acclaimed but short-lived television drama My So-Called Life, quickly establishing herself as one of her generation's most respected young dramatic actors before moving into film.

She played veterinarian Kate Brewster as the one person in the film keeping her head — years before Homeland made her Hollywood's reigning master of the controlled-panic close-up. Already a respected film actress from My So-Called Life and Romeo + Juliet, she brought a grounded naturalism to a franchise more often built around physical spectacle than quiet character work.

Her performance helped anchor the film's human stakes against its larger robot-uprising plot, a role that sits between two much more celebrated stretches of her career on either side of it.