Despite spray tans and brief stints as a blonde, she could rarely convince producers to see her as the heroine, the nice girl. “That’s the journey of every brunette.”The joke came by way of a video call in early April from her home in North London. (She and her husband, the English actor Tom Riley, spend half the year there and the other half in Los Angeles.) Jesse Eisenberg, her co-star in the FX limited series “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” expressed a similar observation. “She has such an unusual, distinctive quality of world weariness and humor, jadedness, but also hopefulness,” he said in a phone interview.

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