Karen Gillan, the Highlander Hollywood kept casting as cyborgs and video-game avatars

Karen Gillan

Photo: Pedro Heshike for Galaxy Con / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 28, 1987 Inverness, Scotland, UK
Occupation	Actress, film director and screenwriter
Known for	Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Guardians of the Galaxy
Awards	National Television · Empire Award · Glasgow Film Festival Audience · TV Choice

Count the faces Karen Gillan has worn on a cinema screen and her own comes surprisingly low on the list. For Marvel she shaved her head and spent long sessions in the make-up chair to become Nebula, the blue, half-mechanical adopted daughter of Thanos. In the Jumanji films she is the avatar a shy teenager gets trapped inside. In Dual she played a dying woman and the clone grown to replace her. A critic at The Hollywood Reporter once summed up her years after Doctor Who as a run of “cyborgs, computer avatars and a thinly imagined assassin”, and the description was hard to argue with.

The contradiction is that the most personal film she has made comes with no disguise at all. The Party’s Just Beginning, the feature she wrote, directed and starred in, was shot in winter in Inverness, the Highland town where she grew up, and it looks straight at the region’s suicide rate. The next big role on her calendar closes that circle. In Chad Stahelski’s Highlander she plays Heather, the mortal wife of Henry Cavill‘s Connor MacLeod, and the sixteenth-century scenes were filmed at Eilean Donan Castle, a couple of hours’ drive from the street she grew up on.

An only child in Inverness

Karen Sheila Gillan, the only child of Marie and Raymond Gillan, was born in Inverness on 28 November 1987. Her father is a singer who performs as John Gillan. At sixteen she left for Edinburgh to study acting and performance at Telford College, and at eighteen she moved to London to train at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. A modelling agency spotted her while she was still a drama student and she walked at London Fashion Week in 2007, an experience she has said she enjoyed without ever preferring it to acting.

Television came early, and mostly in costume. She left school to take a first part in ITV’s detective series Rebus, then joined the ensemble of Channel 4’s The Kevin Bishop Show, a sketch programme in which she impersonated celebrities from Cheryl Cole to Angelina Jolie. Between those jobs she played a soothsayer in “The Fires of Pompeii”, an episode of Doctor Who. Nobody knew it yet, but it was an audition.

Amy Pond

When Steven Moffat took over Doctor Who as showrunner, his first series introduced Gillan as Amy Pond, the girl from a Gloucestershire village who waits years for the Doctor to come back and then runs off with him on the night before her wedding. She arrived beside Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor in “The Eleventh Hour”, with her real-life cousin Caitlin Blackwood playing the young Amelia, and stayed through the fifth and sixth series and the first five episodes of the seventh. Amy was impatient, funny and stubborn, and Gillan kept her own Highland accent for the part. The part brought her the National Television Award for Best Drama Performance in 2012. She came back for a brief goodbye in Smith’s last Christmas episode, “The Time of the Doctor”.

She used that visibility to test herself somewhere else. In 2011 she played Shirley in John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence at the Donmar Warehouse in London, opposite Douglas Hodge. In 2012 she was the model Jean Shrimpton in the television film We’ll Take Manhattan, about Shrimpton’s partnership with the photographer David Bailey. A year later she appeared on Broadway for a single night, in a short play called Time to Act staged for the benefit evening The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway.

Shaving her head for Marvel

The move to Hollywood came through two very different films. Mike Flanagan cast her as Kaylie Russell in Oculus, a horror film about a young woman convinced that an antique mirror destroyed her family, and she set out to prove it on camera. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and gave Gillan her first lead in an American feature; Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com described her character as “a driven woman on the edge of sanity”.

Then came James Gunn‘s Guardians of the Galaxy, for which she shaved her head to play Nebula. The timing was awkward. She was also the lead of the ABC sitcom Selfie, as Eliza Dooley, a social-media-obsessed update of Eliza Doolittle opposite John Cho, and that part needed hair, so Marvel had a wig made from the hair she had cut off. Selfie was cancelled after seven episodes, with the rest released on Hulu, and only later found a devoted following, much of it in China.

Nebula went the other way. What began as a scowling henchwoman grew, across Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Thor: Love and Thunder and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, into one of the more carefully developed characters in the Marvel films: a resentful sister who slowly joins the team she was raised to fight. In Endgame Gillan plays two Nebulas at once, the bitter one from the past and the one who has made peace with her, a trick that depends almost entirely on voice and posture under the same blue make-up. The Empire Awards named her Best Female Newcomer in 2015 for Guardians of the Galaxy and Oculus.

Inside the avatar

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle pushed the disguise further still. Gillan plays Ruby Roundhouse, the martial-arts avatar that a shy, bookish teenager called Martha finds herself trapped inside once a video game swallows her, which meant her real job was to perform an awkward schoolgirl’s body language inside a fighter’s frame. The joke landed. That film and its sequel, Jumanji: The Next Level, turned Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Gillan into one of the most dependable comedy quartets of their decade.

Around the blockbusters she kept taking smaller parts that pulled in other directions: a brief role in Adam McKay’s The Big Short, Ti West’s western In a Valley of Violence, The Circle with Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, the comedy Stuber, a voice in the animated Spies in Disguise, and the Jack London adaptation The Call of the Wild, in which she shared the screen with Harrison Ford.

Behind the camera

She had started writing and directing before the Marvel money arrived. Her short film Coward screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and she wrote, directed and starred in a second short, Conventional. The Party’s Just Beginning was the bigger risk. She cast herself as Liusaidh, a young woman in Inverness stuck in a supermarket job and drinking her way through the year since her best friend, Alistair, took his own life, and shot the film in the city in January and February 2017, in the dark Highland winter. The film won the Audience Award at the Glasgow Film Festival in 2018 and was nominated for best feature at the BAFTA Scotland awards. It also took her to Mikeysline, an Inverness crisis-support charity she visited and publicly pledged to support. In 2020 she wrote and directed another film, The Hoarding.

Where the reviews push back

Not all of it has worked, and critics have been precise about why. Gunpowder Milkshake, the neon assassin thriller she led alongside Lena Headey, Angela Bassett, Carla Gugino and Michelle Yeoh, earned her a Critics’ Choice Super Award nomination, though the character rarely gets out from under the film’s candy-coloured styling. When Riley Stearns’ Dual arrived, a deadpan science-fiction story she carried in a double role and which was shot entirely in Tampere, Finland, John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that it gave her “a barely more human role to play”. That is the real risk in her filmography: genre machinery that hides the performer it is built around, with the actress often more interesting than the concept.

When directors take the machinery away, the notices change. Damon Wise of Deadline praised her “engaging and refreshingly vanity-free performance” in the small comedy Late Bloomers, and Lucy Mangan wrote in The Guardian that her “magnificent performance keeps all the possibilities in play” in Douglas Is Cancelled.

Back to Moffat, and the end of the world

That four-part ITV series, broadcast in the summer of 2024, reunited her with Steven Moffat, the writer who had made her Amy Pond. She played Madeline, the sharp younger co-presenter of Hugh Bonneville’s newsreader Douglas Bellowes, whose career starts to unravel after a joke he made at a family wedding is overheard; Alex Kingston, River Song in Doctor Who, was in the cast as well. The same year she starred opposite Russell Crowe in the Australian-shot thriller Sleeping Dogs, and went back to Mike Flanagan for The Life of Chuck, his adaptation of a Stephen King novella. She plays Felicia Gordon, a nurse whose ex-husband, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Marty, crosses town to be with her as the universe appears to be shutting down. The film won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024, the same festival where Gillan revealed she was pregnant, and Neon released it in American cinemas in June 2025.

Personal life

Gillan married the American comedian and writer Nick Kocher, one half of the sketch duo BriTANicK, in May 2022 at Castle Toward, near Dunoon on the Firth of Clyde. The couple met through Instagram. Their daughter, Clementine, was born at the end of 2024, and Gillan announced the birth on 2 January 2025. In early 2026 the Scotch whisky maker Compass Box chose her as the face of its Hedonism 2026 release, the first time that label has carried a real person, in an illustrated design by the Australian artist Emma Hack.

What comes next

The next fifteen months are crowded. Let’s Have Kids!, Adam Sztykiel’s comedy about two best friends, played by Gillan and Zoë Chao, who decide to get pregnant at the same time, arrives on digital platforms on 13 October 2026, with Sam Richardson, Max Greenfield and Mary Steenburgen also in the cast. On 25 December 2026, a fortnight later than first planned, Jumanji: Open World reunites her with Johnson, Hart and Black under director Jake Kasdan in what is billed as the last instalment, with the game breaking out of its console and into the real world. Apple TV has added her to the fourth season of Shrinking, the series in which Harrison Ford plays a therapist, in a role it is keeping under wraps, with the season expected in 2027.

And then there is Highlander, which Amazon MGM’s United Artists is preparing for cinemas in 2027, with Russell Crowe and Dave Bautista also in the cast. After a decade of blue skin, game avatars and clones, it sends Gillan back to the Highlands she comes from, to play the one character in the story who is entirely, stubbornly mortal.

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Tags: actors, Mike Flanagan, Guardians of the Galaxy, Karen Gillan, Doctor Who, Highlander, Jumanji: Open World

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