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Anna Gunn

Anna Gunn brings a grounded, watchful intensity to characters placed under pressure. Her performances tend to resist easy judgment, making room for frustration, resolve and contradiction rather than smoothing away the difficult edges. Born in Cleveland on August 11, 1968, Gunn grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She studied theater at Northwestern University, graduating in 1990, and spent a semester at the British American Drama Academy. That stage training became one strand of a career spanning television, film, theater and voice acting. Her first screen credit came in an episode of Quantum Leap. Gunn later appeared in Seinfeld, Murder One and Six Feet Under, while taking on longer television runs as Assistant District Attorney Jean Ward in The Practice and Martha Bullock in Deadwood. Those roles helped establish her ability to hold her ground within dense ensemble dramas. Her most prominent television work came as Skyler White in Breaking Bad. Gunn received three consecutive Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series from 2012 through 2014, winning in 2013 and 2014. In 2013, she also wrote a New York Times op-ed examining the public dislike directed at Skyler—a revealing response to how intensely audiences engaged with the character. Gunn’s film work includes Without Evidence, Enemy of the State, Treading Water and Red State. She starred in the female-driven Wall Street drama Equity, which premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, and appeared that year in Clint Eastwood’s Sully. Away from the screen, she starred Off-Broadway opposite Billy Magnussen in Sex with Strangers and later played Maxine Faulk in a limited run of Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana at the Noël Coward Theatre. She has also worked as a voice actor, playing Ariel in the Legacy of Kain video game series.