Hannah John-Kamen

Building a Physical Presence

Hannah John-Kamen was born in Anlaby, a small town in Yorkshire, with a genetic mix the British industry took a while to categorize. Her father is a Nigerian forensic psychologist and her mother is a Norwegian model. Before becoming an actress, she was a professional dancer, and that training in movement turned out to be her greatest asset in London castings. She studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama and graduated in 2011.

In 2012, she voiced several characters in the video game Dark Souls II. It was a technical, dark job that paid the bills while she looked for a foothold on television. But her first real stroke of luck did not come in the English period drama; it came in pure science fiction.

In 2015, she landed the lead role of Dutch in the series Killjoys.

Five seasons and fifty episodes gave her the chance to learn weapons handling and combat choreography. The Syfy series was not a major prestige production, but it gave her the stage experience that casting directors in Los Angeles started asking about. The body leads over dialogue.

The Assault on the Major Studios

Steven Spielberg saw her in a clip from that series and decided she should play the villain in Ready Player One in 2018. There was no lengthy audition or months-long process. The director was looking for someone who could project an immediate physical threat without needing big speeches.

And the gamble paid off.

That same year, she played Ghost in Ant-Man and the Wasp. It was a complex shoot where the motion-capture suit and visual effects limited her acting. But she gave a flat character on the page a backstory of real pain. In 2018, she also took part in the reboot of Tomb Raider alongside Alicia Vikander.

But the excess of visual effects eventually wore her down a little. So she decided to return to British television in search of characters with more substance and less green screen.

Realism and Genre Productions

In 2020, she starred in The Stranger for Netflix. The miniseries, based on the novel by Harlan Coben, was a massive ratings hit in Europe and the United States. Her portrayal of a mysterious woman who dismantles perfect lives let her step away from laser guns for a while.

More than 40 million accounts watched the series in its first month on air.

That shift in register led her to accept the role of Jill Valentine in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City in 2021. The film was a critical failure, but she defended the project as an opportunity to play an icon of the video game world she had grown up with. In 2023, she shot the fantasy film In the Lost Lands under the direction of Paul W.S. Anderson.

In 2025, she returns to the Marvel universe to reprise her role as Ava Starr in Thunderbolts*. Filming for the production wrapped in July 2024 after moving through various locations in the state of Georgia. The film's estimated budget exceeds $200 million.