Frankie Adams

The Boxing Ring Before the Set

Frankie Adams did not break into acting through the usual channels of Auckland's drama schools. In 2010 she was a sixteen-year-old who threw punches at an amateur boxing gym while looking for a way out of her neighborhood routine. Her imposing physique and a gaze that seems to scan every corner of the room opened the doors of New Zealand television almost by accident.

In 2011 she landed the role of Ula Levi on the long-running series Shortland Street. That experience was her real university, since she filmed scenes at a frantic pace for more than fifty weeks a year. But medical drama was not the final destination for a woman who stands one meter and eighty centimeters tall and projects an unusual physical strength for the industry.

New Zealand television was her first battleground.

She left the series in 2014 to look for projects that demanded more than hospital dialogue. In 2016, she appeared in One Thousand Ropes, a film directed by Tusi Tamasese that explored Samoan roots and the weight of family tradition. That project was key to reconnecting with her cultural identity before the American market came knocking with a hard science fiction proposal.

Bobbie Draper's Leap into the Unknown

The production of The Expanse was desperately searching for an actress who could bring to life Roberta "Bobbie" Draper, a Martian marine of Polynesian descent. Readers of James S.A. Corey's novels had a very specific mental image of the character, and Adams fit it to a T. In 2017 she debuted in the second season of the series and changed how women warriors were perceived on modern television.

Nobody expected a Martian marine to have a Polynesian accent.

And the gamble paid off, because Adams brought a contained vulnerability to a character who, on paper, was only meant to be a killing machine. Over the six seasons the show ran, she worked in motion-capture suits and heavy armor that required constant physical training. In 2018 she had a brief appearance in the blockbuster Peter Jackson Mortal Engines, though big-budget cinema did not pull her away from more intimate stories.

But her career didn't stop when the Rocinante shut down its engines in 2022. The streaming industry already had her on its radar as an actress capable of carrying complex dramas without relying on special effects. So she decided to diversify her roles so that the marine uniform wouldn't become a creative prison.

New Horizons in Streaming

In 2023 she joined the cast of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart alongside Sigourney Weaver. In this miniseries she played Candy Blue and showed that her stage presence did not depend on physical action but on her ability to convey generational trauma. Filming in Australia during 2022 allowed her to explore a much slower, rawer tone than her previous space-based work.

HBO's production recruited her in 2024 for the second season of The Last of Us to bring Mel to life. This role marked her definitive entry into one of the most profitable franchises of the decade and required filming in extreme weather conditions in Canada. In 2025, her schedule was filled with the announcement that she would join the live-action version of Moana for Disney.

In 2026 she will play Sina in the film adaptation of the animated hit from 2016. The movie has an estimated budget of 150 million dollars and was shot on location in Hawaii under the direction of Thomas Kail. The production scheduled its worldwide premiere for July 10, 2026.