MyAnna Buring

From horror caves to Victorian palaces

MyAnna Buring wasn't born in London, though her career feels thoroughly British. She was born in Sweden in 1979 but grew up in Oman, under a sun that has nothing to do with the humidity of European recording studios. At 16, she moved to England with a firm plan to study acting and ended up graduating from the prestigious LAMDA in 2004.

In 2005, Neil Marshall put her in a cave to shoot The Descent. It was a physically grueling production with a budget of just 3.5 million pounds, and it ended up grossing nearly 60 million worldwide. Buring played Sam, and her blood-smeared face stuck in the minds of genre fans.

That horror movie changed her luck.

But she didn't want to be confined to horror films. In 2011 she took part in Kill List under Ben Wheatley's direction. It was a dark project that blended family drama with cult horror, and it showed she could carry the weight of a complex plot without losing her footing. As a result, British television casting directors started calling her for period roles.

In 2012 she joined the cast of the series Ripper Street. She played Long Susan across 37 episodes and five seasons of intense filming in Dublin. The character was the owner of a brothel in late 19th-century London, and she demanded a mix of business toughness and emotional fragility that Buring handled with surgical precision.

The weight of authority on screen

And the British industry took notice.

Buring has always had the ability to seem both icy and vulnerable at the same time. In 2012 she appeared in Downton Abbey as Edna Braithwaite, and soon after she took on the role of the coven leader in Denali in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2. That gave her a global visibility she had not actively sought until then.

In 2019, she landed the project that connected her to big-budget epic fantasy. She played Tissaia de Vries in The Witcher for Netflix. Her character was the head of Aretuza and the mentor of the lead. For this role, she had to develop a much deeper voice and a rigid posture that conveyed centuries of magical authority.

She took on the challenge without fear of being typecast.

In 2022, she swapped sorceress robes for a police uniform in the series The Responder. She worked alongside Martin Freeman in a rainy, nighttime Liverpool that recalled her early days in gritty cinema. It was a production that demanded very long night shoots to capture the real light of English streets.

In 2023 she was part of the cast of the movie 97 Minutes, directed by Tiago Mesquita. Filming took place mainly in locations in Hampshire and focused on the tension inside a hijacked plane. The film had a running time of 93 minutes of final footage.