Jessica Rothe

In a cheap hotel room, an alarm clock goes off at nine in the morning, a man in a baby mask bursts in armed, and Jessica Rothe is stabbed to death on the floor. Four minutes later the alarm goes off again and she wakes up unharmed. She filmed that same death dozens of times in a row without losing the comedic punch.

Rothe was born in Denver in 1987. Her paternal grandmother acted in amateur theater companies, and that detail set the rhythm of her childhood. By the age of twelve, she was spending her afternoons in classical ballet classes. She soon realized that pointe shoes weren't for her, but the discipline of dance stayed with her body for life.

She studied Fine Arts at Boston University. After graduating in 2009, she did what all her classmates did: moved into a tiny apartment in New York and landed one audition after another for TV commercials. She appeared as a background supporting actress in one-off episodes of Gossip Girl and Blue Bloods. She earned modest paychecks just to pay the rent.

Nobody knew who she was yet.

The Green Dress and the Time Loop Trap

Her face began to catch the attention of casting directors thanks to a lucky, choreographed break. In 2016, Damien Chazelle cast her in La La Land. She played Alexis, one of Emma Stone's roommates, dressed in bright green for the apartment musical number. That sequence lasted only a few minutes on screen, but it was enough for casting offices in Los Angeles to take note of her name.

The following year, director Christopher Landon handed her the script for Happy Death Day. The premise looked like a lazy rehash of teen horror with a time-loop structure. Rothe turned Tree Gelbman, a character written on the page as an obnoxious college student, into an absolute engine of satirical energy. She cried, screamed, got hit with axes and laughed at her own corpse.

The movie cost less than $5 million and grossed more than $125 million at the box office. Its commercial success led to the making of Happy Death Day 2U in 2019, where she doubled down on the physical work, blending parodic science fiction with pure melodrama.

The scream queen label fit her too small almost instantly.

Then the market tried to pigeonhole her into conventional romance. She took part in commercial dramas such as Forever My Girl in 2018 and the medical melodrama Para toda la vida in 2020. She delivered at the box office, but the projects suffered from overly predictable formulas. In 2020, she also headlined the musical remake of Valley Girl, which premiered directly on digital platforms during the global theater shutdown.

High-impact choreography and sharp punches

Rather than settling into lightweight comedy, she sought out physical projects that demanded hard training. In 2020, she appeared in the TV adaptation of Utopia for Amazon and later joined the audio drama Gaslight. She wanted to get her hands dirty in front of the camera.

That change of tone came abruptly in 2024 with Boy Kills World, produced by Sam Raimi. Rothe took on the role of June 27, an elite enforcer who faces off in clean, hard-hitting fights against the lead played by Bill Skarsgård. She barely speaks a line of dialogue throughout the film, putting ninety percent of her dramatic weight into hand-to-hand combat and the martial language she learned during months of rehearsal.

She did not use stunt doubles for most of her fight scenes.

To film that production in South Africa, she spent weeks learning fencing and mixed martial arts techniques. The movie flopped in commercial theaters with a global box office of barely $3 million against a bloated budget, but it confirmed her technical skill for raw action on screen.