Jennifer Finnigan

Three statuettes in three years

Jennifer Finnigan arrived in the American industry with a streak of records that still sparks talk in production offices today. Between 2002 and 2004, she won three consecutive Emmy Awards for her work on The Bold and the Beautiful. No one in the young actress category had achieved a similar feat. That triple win was not a matter of luck but of a work ethic she had learned back in her native Montreal.

Television doesn't forgive major mistakes.

And Finnigan knew exactly what she was doing when she left the security of daytime television for prime time. In 2004, she joined the cast of Crossing Jordan, and just one year later she was leading her own legal drama. In Close to Home, she played a prosecutor returning from maternity leave to take on criminal cases in residential neighborhoods. The show performed well in the ratings, but CBS decided to cancel it after two seasons due to a change in its programming strategy.

But the break didn't last long. In 2007, she married actor Jonathan Silverman in a private ceremony in Mykonos. That wedding was one of the few times the actress made the society pages. She has always preferred to keep a low profile away from the sets because she understands that personal mystery helps the credibility of the character.

The desert and political survival

Finnigan's career took a sharp turn in 2014 when she accepted the role of Molly Al-Fayeed in Tyrant. The production was initially shot in Israel, but the war forced the entire crew to relocate to Turkey and Morocco. It was a grueling shoot. The actors worked in extreme temperatures while playing a plot of political intrigue in a fictional Middle Eastern country.

And the gamble paid off.

For three seasons, the show kept a steady balance between family drama and geopolitics. Finnigan played the American wife of a would-be dictator, and her performance avoided the trap of the decorative trophy wife. After this chapter ended in 2016, she looked for projects that would let her explore science fiction and suspense. That led her to Salvation in 2017, where she played a Pentagon spokesperson facing the threat of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.

In 2021, she returned to her Canadian roots to star in Moonshine. It's a dark comedy-drama about a family fighting over control of a crumbling resort in Nova Scotia. She plays Lidia Bennett, an architect who comes home to restore order to a complete mess of debts and family secrets.

Production on the third season of this series wrapped up in 2023 after completing a 24-episode run filmed on location along the Atlantic coast. The budget for each episode topped $2 million due to the logistics of shooting in remote outdoor locations. Finnigan balanced her lead role with directing one of the episodes.

In 2024, the actress maintains her residence between Los Angeles and Canada, where she runs her projects as an independent producer. Her most recent behind-the-scenes work was supervising the editing of a documentary about the impact of the film industry on rural communities in her country.