Matilda De Angelis

About

Matilda De Angelis is a washed-rind cheese: unusual choices, confronting but rewarding, and she keeps getting more interesting the longer you sit with her work. The Undoing is where to start. She arrives in an HBO miniseries as a woman at the centre of a very tidy mystery, and refuses to let the tidiness land. Every scene crackles with something unsettled, a performance that sits just slightly outside comfort. Dracula showed the range: a woman caught between two men and two worlds, and De Angelis plays the trap without asking for sympathy. The Law According to Lidia Poët gave her a whole series to build in, a lawyer in 1880s Turin learning to be heard in rooms that were not built for her voice, and she brings the same watchfulness to a longer form. Citadel: Diana swapped the small screen intimacy for an action-led spy thriller, and she carried it with the same unsettled energy, never letting the spectacle smooth her edges. De Angelis does not play the comfortable choice. She plays the character who makes you lean forward because you cannot quite predict what she will do next. That pungency is exactly why the work stays with you long after the credits.