Willa Fitzgerald

Willa Fitzgerald was born on January 17, 1991, in Nashville, Tennessee, the only child of musician parents — her mother Judith Dohse and father Edward Fitzgerald played together in a band for two decades before she arrived. She grew up an only child in a household where performance was the family trade, and by her own account she spent much of her childhood reading and re-enacting stories. She attended Harpeth Hall School, a private college-preparatory school for girls in Nashville, graduating in 2009, then headed to Yale University — where she spent her first three years studying psychology before switching to theater studies and graduating with a BA in 2013. At Yale she wrote, acted in, and directed plays, and she was signed by an agent before she had even finished her degree.

Her first screen credit came in 2008, while she was still a teenager: a part as Vivian in the indie film For the Love of a Dog. But the real start of her professional career followed Yale. In 2013 she made her television debut as Lola Laffer on Amazon Studios' political satire Alpha House, and in 2014 she landed a recurring role as Emma Miller on the USA Network's Royal Pains. Around the same years she stacked up the kind of guest spots that mark a working actor on the rise — Blue Bloods, The Following, Gotham (as Grace Fairchild), Bull, Billions, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Younger — each one a little more screen time, each one proof she could slide into any ensemble.

The role that made her a name came in 2015, when MTV cast her as Emma Duval, the lead of Scream: The TV Series. Reimagining the slasher franchise for a serialized teen-drama format was a high-wire act — the show had to honor the Ghostface legacy while building something of its own — and Fitzgerald carried it as the series' final girl across two seasons (2015–2016). Emma Duval was more than a scream queen: Fitzgerald played her as a genuinely traumatized teenager whose resilience had to be earned, not handed to her. The performance earned her a Teen Choice Award nomination and a young audience that would follow her into everything else she did.

Fitzgerald refused to be typecast by genre. In 2017 she played Meg March in the BBC/PBS Masterpiece adaptation of Little Women — the eldest March sister, pragmatic and romantic at once — proving she could hold her own in a period drama stacked with British acting royalty. On the big screen she appeared as adult Kitsey Barbour in The Goldfinch (2019), the adaptation of Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. And on USA Network she took one of her darkest roles yet: Colette French, the cheerleading coach at the center of Dare Me (2019–2020), a woman whose authority over her squad curdles into something dangerous. Fitzgerald played Colette with a chilling command — seductive, manipulative, and utterly believable.

Then came Reacher. Cast as Officer Roscoe Conklin in Amazon Prime Video's adaptation of Lee Child's novels, Fitzgerald arrived in the small town of Margrave in 2022 and walked off with the season. Roscoe was the moral center of the show — the cop who hadn't been corrupted, the one with the competence and the spine to stand next to Alan Ritchson's mountain of a Jack Reacher. Her chemistry with Ritchson gave the season its heartbeat, and Reacher became one of Amazon's biggest streaming hits, catapulting Fitzgerald from "that girl from Scream" to a mainstream leading-lady contender.

If Reacher was her breakthrough, The Fall of the House of Usher was her coronation. In Mike Flanagan's 2023 Netflix horror miniseries, Fitzgerald played the younger Madeline Usher — the ruthless, brilliant, terrifying half of the Usher siblings' empire. Opposite Mary McDonnell's older Madeline, Fitzgerald had to sell a woman who had clawed her way to the top of a pharmaceutical dynasty through sheer force of will and moral bankruptcy. It was the most commanding performance of her career: every scene felt like watching someone think three moves ahead of everyone else in the room. Critics singled her out as one of the miniseries' great discoveries.

She followed it with Strange Darling, the 2023 thriller (released wide in 2024) in which she stars as "The Lady" opposite Kyle Gallner. Shot on 35mm and structured as a non-linear cat-and-mouse game, the film asks Fitzgerald to carry enormous swaths of screen time with raw, feral intensity — and she does, delivering a performance that critics called electric and fearless. It cemented her as one of the most exciting genre actors of her generation.

Fitzgerald has kept the pace relentless ever since. In 2025 she starred as Danielle "Danny" Simms in PULSE, Netflix's hospital drama; played Jenny Davidson in Regretting You, the adaptation of Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel, opposite Allison Williams and McKenna Grace; appeared as Rosetti in the thriller Relay; and joined the ensemble of A House of Dynamite as Abby Jansing. It's a filmography that now spans horror, action, prestige drama, period pieces, and romance — built by an actor who never repeats herself.

What makes Willa Fitzgerald matter is the arc. She started in genre television, paid her dues in guest spots, and leveled up with every job — a Yale-trained theater actor who treats a slasher series and a Mike Flanagan miniseries with the same seriousness. She has range that most actors twice her age don't, a willingness to play women who are difficult and dangerous, and a screen presence that keeps getting bigger. She's not just getting started — she's just getting recognized.

Willa Fitzgerald's career has been a slow-burn masterclass in leveling up. She started as Emma Duval on MTV's Scream — solid genre work — then broke through to the mainstream as Roscoe Conklin on Reacher, the small-town cop who could more than hold her own against Alan Ritchson's mountain.

But the performance that announced her as something special was Madeline Usher in Mike Flanagan's The Fall of the House of Usher: ruthless, brilliant, terrifying — a gender-flipped take on Poe's doomed aristocrat played with total command. Fitzgerald's got the range for a long career, and she's just getting started.