WOMEN WE LOVE: Rebecca Ferguson

It’s no surprise that Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson shines again in the second season of "Silo", Apple TV+'s dystopian series. Whether she plays the sinister cult leader Rose the Hat in Doctor Sleep, the astronaut Miranda North in Life, or the enigmatic Lady Jessica Atreides in the Dune saga, or Agent Ilsa Faust in the Mission: Impossible franchise, in all cases, we are dealing with an actress who has managed to perfectly ambody all the characters she has taken on, whether romantic, action, or horror-oriented. She is an all-terrain actress, able to imbue all the characters she has played with lasting impact.

From her beginnings in the Swedish soap opera "Nya Tider", playing the young Anna Gripenhielm when she was 16, she has not stopped growing as an actress. Her first big break came when she was cast as Elizabeth Woodville in the BBC's 10-part historical television drama "The White Queen" (2013). However, while her performance was widely praised, the final leap didn't come until 2015, when she was chosen to play the role of MI6 agent Ilsa Faust in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015). Her resemblance to the legendary actress Ingrid Bergman would have attracted the attention of Tom Cruise, who chose her for the role: "Her elegance and intelligence jump off the screen. She reminded [director Christopher McQuarrie] and me of Ingrid Bergman."

She has played the character of Ilsa Faust in 3 films of the saga so far. Still, in Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), she brought the character to its maximum expression, giving her all the potential the character could have. Ferguson gives the character a dimension of her own, highlighting her feminine potential in a world dominated by male spies. After the first Mission: Impossible, Ferguson would have some of her greatest performances. Among these are her role as Jenny Lind, a famous Swedish singer known as the "Swedish Nightingale" in The Greatest Showman (2017), and her role as Rose the Hat, the shadowy leader of a cult that feeds off people's psychic powers, in Doctor Sleep (2019). The movie adapts the novel of the same name by Stephen King and is a sequel to the iconic Stanley Kubrick film The Shining. One of the most stellar moments of Ferguson's performance is a scene where she kills a boy to absorb his psychic power. 

By the time she played Lady Jessica, Paul Atreides's Bene Gesserit mother in the epic science-fiction film Dune: Part One, Ferguson was already considered an actress capable of playing all kinds of roles and managing to give them their maximum potential.

Now we can see Rebecca Ferguson in her role as the engineer Juliette Nichols in the second season of "Silo", which is also leaving a strong mark. If the first season was one a revelatory series of recent times, the second season has broken the barrier to the point that Rotten Tomatoes places it at a 96% critical rating. Directed by Graham Yost and based on the trilogy of novels by Hugh Howey, the second season of "Silo" seems even more magnetic than the first. In the first season, we discovered a toxic and ruined world where thousands of people lived in silos full of strict regulations. And now, in the second season, we climb the ladder: we know the silo, but we don't know who created it, why, or what lies beyond, and the series traps us in an escalation of curiosity and terror.

"Silo", Dune, Doctor Sleep, Mission: Impossible… And now comes the news of her next role in the Peaky Blinders movie at Netflix, which is still in pre-production and will come out in late-2025/early-2026. Rebecca Ferguson dares all genres and all characters and always leaves a unique mark. She is a woman who impresses the feminine presence in traditionally male roles and does so with the versatility of great actors. She is always unique!