Mackenzie Davis, star of Netflix’s Below, is the actress blockbusters never figured out

Mackenzie Davis

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 1, 1987 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Martian, Blade Runner 2049, Terminator: Dark Fate
Awards	Critics' Choice · Tribeca Film Festival

In Netflix‘s Below, a fishing town in Newfoundland pulls something out of the sea that should not be there, and the first person to read the evidence correctly is a marine researcher played by Mackenzie Davis. It is a familiar seat for her. For a decade, studios have cast the Canadian actress as the capable woman standing between other people and a catastrophe: a NASA engineer in one film, a soldier rebuilt with machine parts in another. What they rarely asked for is the thing she does best, which is to play someone who refuses to become the function the plot has assigned her.

That gap explains a career that looks lopsided on paper. The big studio films that were supposed to make her a franchise lead mostly lost money. The shows that drew small audiences turned her into one of the actresses critics follow from project to project.

Davis grew up in Vancouver, where she was born on April 1, 1987, to Lotte, a graphic designer, and John Davis, a hairdresser from Liverpool; her parents own the hair-care company AG Hair. She studied at McGill University in Montreal and then moved to New York to train at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. Her first feature was Smashed, a drama about a schoolteacher trying to stop drinking, and a supporting part in the Toronto romantic comedy The F Word, released in the United States as What If, brought a Canadian Screen Award nomination.

The break came on AMC. In Halt and Catch Fire, a drama about the personal-computer boom of the 1980s, she played Cameron Howe, a punk programmer who treats every manager as an obstacle. The series never found a mass audience. By its third season live viewing had sunk to around 300,000 people, and AMC renewed it anyway, in 2016, for a fourth and final run of ten episodes so its creators could end it on their own terms. Critics who had shrugged at the first season ended up treating the partnership between Davis and Kerry Bishé, who played the engineer Donna Clark, as the real centre of the show.

Meanwhile Hollywood offered supporting work at scale. In Ridley Scott’s The Martian she was Mindy Park, the satellite engineer who spots that the stranded astronaut is still alive. In Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 she played Mariette, a replicant working with the resistance. The smaller parts said more. She was Yorkie in “San Junipero”, the Black Mirror episode about two women who meet in a simulated beach town, and she won the best actress prize for a U.S. narrative feature at Tribeca for Always Shine, a thriller about two actress friends whose rivalry curdles into violence.

Jason Reitman’s Tully gave her a title role opposite Charlize Theron, as the night nanny who arrives to rescue an exhausted mother of three. The script’s final turn reveals the character to be something other than she seems, and the film works because Davis plays her with a lightness that hides the trick.

The real test of whether she could carry a franchise came with Terminator: Dark Fate, in which she played Grace, an augmented soldier sent back from the future, alongside Linda Hamilton. The film lost more than $120 million, by The Hollywood Reporter’s estimate, and the new trilogy its producers had talked about never materialised. Davis did not pretend otherwise. “Six is too much, now we know,” she said of the franchise’s sequel count, while defending the film itself and wondering aloud how much of the audience’s indifference had to do with three women leading a Terminator film. The common reading, that the flop proved she was miscast as an action lead, gets the evidence backwards. Grace is the most physical performance of her career and it holds up; what failed was the sixth attempt at the same story.

Television answered the question better than the cinema had. After playing Harper in Clea DuVall’s Happiest Season, the holiday comedy in which Kristen Stewart‘s character plans to propose to a girlfriend who has not come out to her family, Davis led Station Eleven, the HBO Max adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel. She played Kirsten Raymonde, a former child actor who, twenty years after a pandemic, performs Shakespeare with a travelling company around the Great Lakes. The series arrived as a real pandemic entered its second winter, and the role earned her the Critics’ Choice Super Award for best actress in a science fiction or fantasy series.

She kept moving sideways rather than up. In 2023 she went to London to play Isolde in Simon Stone’s version of Phaedra at the National Theatre, and the same year she wrote, directed and produced WOACA, a short that screened in the Short Cuts programme at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2024 she appeared in Swimming Home, which premiered at Rotterdam, and in Speak No Evil, the Blumhouse remake of a Danish horror film, as Louise Dalton, a mother whose weekend in the English countryside with a charming stranger played by James McAvoy turns into a fight to get out alive.

My Notes on Mars, the English-language debut of the Hungarian director Lili Horvát, opened the Giornate degli Autori section of the Venice Film Festival on September 2, 2026. Davis plays Margot, an astrophysicist who left MIT for her husband’s family land outside Budapest, disappears on a hike and walks back in on the day of her own memorial service, changed in ways her husband, played by Rupert Friend, prefers not to examine. Screen Daily called it an eerie, genre-coded film about love, desire and control.

On Netflix, Below arrives on October 8, 2026, as a six-episode limited series created by Jesse McKeown and shot on location in Newfoundland. Josh Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, a stubborn fisherman haunted by his father’s death, Charlie Heaton plays his son Wade, and Davis is Dr. Fonda Howander, the researcher who suspects early that something is wrong with what the boats are bringing in. Its first two episodes drew warm notices for the ensemble at the Toronto festival in September.

Next on her slate is The Undertow, a British drama for Netflix adapted from the Norwegian series Twin, in which Jamie Dornan plays identical twin brothers and Davis plays Nicola, the wife caught between them. It was shot in the Scottish Highlands and has no release date yet. It is another story about a woman deciding which version of a man to believe, and if her record is a guide, Nicola will not be the one the plot gets to push around.