Olivia Colman is easily one of the greatest actors working today, and while she’s been a big star in the UK for years, she wasn’t particularly well-known in America before starring as Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’ satirical historical epic The Favourite.
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The role just earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress, beating out fantastic performances by the likes of Lady Gaga and Glenn Close. Now that she’s entered the mainstream, we should look back on her impressive pre-Oscar win body of work. So, without further ado, here are the 8 Best Olivia Colman roles you never knew about.
Ellie Miller in Broadchurch
Broadchurch is a murder mystery series with three seasons of eight episodes each. The creator of the series always envisioned the show as a trilogy, and so there won’t be any more seasons in the future. But that doesn’t matter, because the existing three warrant rewatches.
At the end of each season, the mystery unravels, and as with any good mystery story, you can go back to the start and see all the hints that were dropped throughout that you might have missed on the first viewing. Broadchurch is one of many British TV series that American networks have tried to remake with little to no success. Fox remade it as a “limited series,” bringing in David Tennant from the original series and replacing Olivia Colman with Anna Gunn.
Helena in The Office
Olivia Colman had a guest role as Helena, a local journalist who interviewed David Brent after he was made redundant, in the original British version of The Office. It was the final episode of the second season – the last proper episode of the show before its Christmas special that acted as a series finale.
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When Helena asked Brent if he was in a relationship with anyone, Brent snapped and said, “Don’t get coarse in a magazine for the public – I don’t think you’d win a Pulitzer Prize for filth.” Helena was the one at whom Brent directed that great quote where he tries to write the article for her: “Brent mused, and then replied...”
Carol Thatcher in The Iron Lady
In the biopic The Iron Lady, Meryl Streep played Margaret Thatcher, the first female British Prime Minister who divided the UK with her controversial policies. As with most political biopics, there’s a star-studded supporting cast playing a bunch of historical figures: Richard E. Grant as Michael Heseltine, Anthony Head as Sir Geoffrey Howe etc.
One such star is Olivia Colman, playing Thatcher’s daughter Carol Thatcher. Carol features prominently in the film, characterized by Colman as a calm and enduring woman who finds her family caught in the middle of a tumultuous time for the nation thanks to her contentious mother.
Hannah in Tyrannosaur
Paddy Considine grew up on a council estate in the Midlands, which is why he used a council estate in the Midlands as the setting of his feature film directorial debut. It’s not an autobiographical story, but the film has such an authentic feel that its script was almost certainly inspired by some real-life events and characters.
Tyrannosaur is a deeply affecting film, not for the faint of heart, and Olivia Colman delivers one of the most incredible performances of her entire career in the role of Hannah. There was an uproar on Twitter when she was snubbed in the BAFTA Award for Best Actress nominations.
Godmother in Fleabag
Olivia Colman is usually known for playing characters who are sweet, or at least likable, but in Fleabag, she plays a character known only as “Godmother” who is truly horrible. The series was created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who also writes and stars in the show.
Waller-Bridge is now best known for writing the fantastic Sandra Oh series Killing Eve and playing the droid rights activist in a Solo: A Star Wars Story subplot with ham-fisted metaphors for racism. But Fleabag is what gave the actress and writer her big break, and it looks as though the show will be around for a while.
Bethan Maguire in Locke
Locke, written and directed by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, was an interesting experiment. The whole movie takes place in a car driven by Tom Hardy, who is the only character to actually appear on-screen. The other eleven characters only make vocal appearances as Hardy speaks to them on the phone. It can’t be easy to make an impact in a movie where all you are is a crackly voice on a speakerphone call, but Olivia Colman manages to do just that in the role of Bethan Maguire.
Bethan is a woman Hardy’s character Ivan Locke had an affair with. She became pregnant with his child and the film is set on the night she goes into premature labor, so it’s a pivotal role in the story. The movie’s success rests on Colman’s performance as much as Hardy’s.
Doris Thatcher in Hot Fuzz
“I’ve been around the station a few times!” Olivia Colman starred alongside Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Edgar Wright’s buddy cop action comedy Hot Fuzz. Her character Doris Thatcher is known for her crude innuendos and flirtatious jokes. For example, when she knocks out a woman with a “Wet Floor” sign, she says, “Nothing like a bit of girl-on-girl!”
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This role is a prime example of Colman demonstrating her comedic chops. It’s not easy to be funny and it’s not easy to make audiences feel with a dramatic performance – but it’s virtually impossible to do both, and Colman’s resumé shows she’s one of the few who can do both.
Sophie Chapman in Peep Show
The role that first put Olivia Colman in the eyes of the British public was that of Sophie Chapman in the Mitchell and Webb sitcom Peep Show. The show was filmed from the point-of-view of its characters and allowed us to hear the thoughts of its central characters, Mark and Jez, in voiceover.
Colman’s character Sophie was the on/off girlfriend of Mark, played by David Mitchell. She began as his crush in the office, but their relationship eventually became much more complicated than that, with broken engagements and illegitimate pregnancies abound. Colman played Sophie’s downfall into drug addiction with both hilarity and humanity.