Morena Baccarin

A last-minute replacement saved her career before it started. Rebecca Gayheart got fired on the first day of Firefly filming, and Baccarin shot her first scene as Inara Serra the same day she was hired. The show lasted one season. The cult following lasted forever.

That fanbase kept her visible through a stretch of guest spots and genre work, but the real pivot came when she landed the alien queen on ABC's V in 2009. Two seasons, cancelled, same pattern. Then Homeland broke it. She played the wife of a returned POW with enough tension that the Television Academy nominated her for an Emmy in 2013. After three seasons, she wasn't a regular anymore, but she didn't need to be.

For years she was the woman standing next to the franchise. She played the emotional core of Deadpool opposite Ryan Reynolds, reprised the role across all three films, and watched the third one gross $1.3 billion. Her take on the experience: "I was hardly on set."

Sheriff Country, a Fire Country spinoff, gave her a network show built entirely around her name. It averaged 7.6 million viewers across platforms, got renewed after six episodes, and overtook its own parent show in streaming numbers. Twenty-five years in, she's finally the name above the title.

Her Juilliard class reads like a casting director's dream. Claire Danes was her high school classmate at the NYC Lab School, and they reunited on Homeland fifteen years later. She dated Glenn Howerton at Juilliard. Her mother was a Brazilian actress, her father an Italian-Brazilian journalist, and the family moved to New York when she was ten.

The refugee advocacy isn't a press junket accessory. She's been an IRC ambassador since 2012, visiting displacement camps in Greece and on the Colombia-Venezuela border, and writing a Newsweek op-ed arguing Venezuela's crisis could produce more refugees than the Syrian war. Most celebrity ambassadors do the photo op. She does the policy brief.