Hannah John-Kamen, the actress who turned a one-film Marvel villain into an Avenger

Hannah John-Kamen

Photo: MTV UK on YouTube / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 7, 1989 Hull, East Yorkshire, England
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Ready Player One, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Ant-Man and the Wasp

Marvel built Ava Starr to be used once. The Ghost of Ant-Man and the Wasp was a woman whose body phased in and out of solid matter, a villain with a grievance and an ending, the kind of part an actor plays, promotes and files away. Hannah John-Kamen did not file it away. When the studio called her back years later for Thunderbolts*, she had already read the comics and knew where the character usually turns up. “I didn’t die in Ant-Man and the Wasp, which is a good start,” she joked to the interviewer Kyle Meredith. Now that one-film villain is on the poster of Avengers: Doomsday, and the English actress who spent a decade as the disruptive force in other people’s stories has become a fixture of the biggest ensemble in Hollywood.

The paradox runs through her whole career. She has been cast again and again as the threat, the stranger, the operative, the bounty hunter with a sealed past. The one time she was offered a sword-and-sorcery franchise of her own, it went to someone else. The roles that stuck are the ones in which she was never meant to be the centre.

She grew up in Hull, the daughter of a Norwegian fashion model and a Nigerian forensic psychologist, the youngest of three children. Her schooling was local, primary school in the village of Kirk Ella and then Hull Collegiate School, and the stage came early: she trained at the National Youth Theatre, learned piano, and studied ballet, jazz, tap, salsa and cabaret dance. It is a background that taught her to read a room from its edges, which may explain how naturally she plays people who arrive from outside a group and change its temperature.

John-Kamen was born on 7 September 1989. She moved to London at 18 and graduated from the Central School of Speech and Drama in 2012, though by then she was already working. In 2011 she recorded voice work for the video game Dark Souls and appeared as Selma Telse in “Fifteen Million Merits”, the second episode of Charlie Brooker‘s Black Mirror. Guest parts followed in Misfits, Whitechapel, The Syndicate and The Hour.

Her first lead was on stage, and it was a public bruising. From December 2012 to June 2013 she played Viva, the title role of Viva Forever!, the Spice Girls musical written by Jennifer Saunders at the Piccadilly Theatre. Reviews were largely hostile. The Daily Mirror singled her out, calling it a shame that she and the cast were let down by a clichéd plot and leaden dialogue. It was an early lesson in surviving a vehicle that does not hold, and not the last one.

British television kept her busy. She played a recurring part in Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley, appeared in Death in Paradise and The Tunnel, and in 2015 joined Russell T Davies’ linked series Cucumber and Banana. The same year brought two very different kinds of exposure. She made her film debut in a small part as a First Order officer in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and she took the lead in Killjoys, a Canadian space western broadcast on Space and Syfy.

Killjoys is the work that made her a genre name. As Dutch, a bounty hunter with a trained assassin’s past she keeps trying to outrun, she carried fifty episodes across five seasons until the series ended in 2019. Dutch was all speed and concealed grief, and the long run gave John-Kamen something rare for a young actor: years to build a character beyond its first impression. In 2016 she also turned up in Game of Thrones as Ornela, and returned to Black Mirror as Sonja in the episode “Playtest”.

Then came 2018, the year Hollywood found her three times. She played Sophie in the Tomb Raider reboot, then F’Nale Zandor, the corporate enforcer of Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One, a role reviewers noticed because it stayed in the physical world while most of the film lived inside a virtual one. A few months later came Ghost. In Ant-Man and the Wasp Ava Starr is the survivor of a quantum accident that left her molecules unstable and her body in constant pain, and John-Kamen played the violence as a direct measure of that pain. Marvel supplied the backstory; she supplied the sense that the villain had a case.

Streaming took over the next stretch. She voiced the Gelfling Naia in Netflix‘s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance in 2019. In 2020 she was the title character of The Stranger, the Netflix adaptation of Harlan Coben‘s novel, a woman in a baseball cap who appears in people’s lives carrying the secret they least want told and vanishes again. The role works because she never explains herself. That same year she played Helm Watson in Peacock’s Brave New World, which was cancelled after one season.

The critical case against her career is not about her performances. It is about the projects. In 2021 she played Jill Valentine in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a reboot that could not decide whether it was homage or horror, and the doctor taken hostage in the Channel Tunnel thriller SAS: Red Notice. Both films cast her as capable and dangerous and gave her almost nothing underneath. The project that might have changed the shape of her career, the lead in Millennium’s Red Sonja, slipped away: she left it in 2022, with scheduling conflicts reported as the reason, and Matilda Lutz took the sword. The folk horror Unwelcome, opposite Douglas Booth in 2023, and the 2025 action thriller Safe House, in which she plays a Defense Department agent locked in with Lucien Laviscount and a possible traitor, kept her working without moving the needle. The pattern is clear enough: she is at her best when a script trusts her with an interior life, and genre cinema rarely does.

Thunderbolts* did. Directed by Jake Schreier and released in May 2025, the film gathers a team of damaged operatives and pits them, in the end, against one man’s depression. “The villain is within yourself. That’s the fight,” John-Kamen said. She chose not to rewatch the 2018 film and came back to Ghost as someone who had changed in the years off screen, calmer, more in control, with a new suit. “We found this British sarcasm in her,” she said. “It’s biting, and it works.” The film drew some of Marvel’s best reviews in years but grossed about 382 million dollars worldwide, a soft figure by the studio’s standards, and Disney rebranded the team as The New Avengers within days of release.

That rebrand is the bridge to now. On 25 July 2026 John-Kamen was on stage in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, part of the cast of Avengers: Doomsday presented alongside directors Anthony and Joe Russo. Ghost returns in the film with David Harbour‘s Red Guardian and Lewis Pullman’s Sentry, the Thunderbolts folded into a much larger war, and it reaches cinemas on 18 December 2026.

Away from Marvel, she has finished One Second After, the adaptation of William R. Forstchen’s novel about a town left without electricity after an electromagnetic pulse attack. She plays Makalya, a nurse stranded in the town, opposite Josh Holloway, under the direction of the veteran stunt coordinator Scott Rogers, from a screenplay by J. Michael Straczynski. The film was shot in Sofia between September and December 2025 and is due in cinemas in 2027. Rachel, a science-fiction thriller directed by Jenn Wexler in which she plays a mother who cannot remember giving birth, opposite Theo Rossi, was announced in 2023 and still has no release date.

She keeps her private life private, and the record reflects that: the public John-Kamen is the work, the interviews about the work, and a sense of humour that keeps puncturing the earnestness of superhero press tours. At 37 she has played more antagonists than heroes. Avengers: Doomsday will test whether Marvel sees Ghost as a supporting threat or as a character worth the space, and One Second After, a film built around a community holding itself together, offers the other thing her career has rarely given her so far: a part where she is not the danger in the room.

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Safe House (2025) — Thunderbolts* (2025) — as Ava Starr

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