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Ashley Johnson

Ashley Johnson has built the kind of career that moves comfortably between live action, animation, games and actual-play storytelling. Born on August 9, 1983, in Camarillo, California, she began acting at six as Chrissy Seaver on Growing Pains. By age 12, she had already appeared in the casts of eight television series, giving her a remarkably early start without defining the limits of what came next. Johnson continued working across television and film, playing Alex Marshall in the comedy What Women Want and appearing as Beth, a waitress caught in the New York attack, in The Avengers. From 2015 to 2020, she had a substantial television run as FBI forensic specialist Patterson on Blindspot. Her voice work reveals another side of her screen presence. Johnson voiced Gretchen Grundler in Recess, Terra in Teen Titans and Gwen Tennyson in the Ben 10 franchise. Her most prominent performance in games came as Ellie in The Last of Us, a role combining voice acting and motion capture. She won a BAFTA for the original game and another for its downloadable chapter, The Last of Us: Left Behind, before returning as Ellie in The Last of Us Part II. In a neat piece of casting history, she later appeared as Ellie's mother, Anna, in the live-action adaptation of The Last of Us. Johnson has also become closely associated with Critical Role. She began playing Pike Trickfoot in 2015, followed by Yasha Nydoorin in the second campaign and Fearne Calloway in the third. She returned to Pike for the animated series The Legend of Vox Machina and has also stepped behind the game master's screen for the one-shot episode The Nautilus Ark. That range is the clearest through-line in Johnson's work: she can serve an ensemble in live action, create a character entirely through her voice, or help shape a long-form performance through improvisation. It is a career less interested in staying within one medium than in finding different ways into a character.