Olivia Cooke

Olivia Cooke is an English actress known for combining genre roles with character-driven independent film and major television drama. Born Olivia Kate Cooke in Oldham, Greater Manchester, in 1993, she began acting as a child through the Oldham Theatre Workshop. She studied drama locally and appeared in school and workshop productions before early television work moved her into professional acting. Rather than following a conventional drama-school route, she built momentum through casting opportunities in British television and then American productions.

Cooke's first screen roles included the BBC miniseries Blackout and The Secret of Crickley Hall. Her international breakthrough came with Bates Motel, the contemporary Psycho prequel in which she played Emma Decody from 2013 to 2017. The role introduced her to American television audiences and showed her ability to make a supporting character emotionally central over multiple seasons. Around the same period she appeared in The Quiet Ones, The Signal, and Ouija, giving her early filmography a strong horror and science-fiction component.

Her film career widened with Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, a Sundance-winning coming-of-age film in which she played Rachel, a teenager with leukemia. Cooke continued with darker or offbeat independent work, including Katie Says Goodbye, The Limehouse Golem, and Thoroughbreds, before reaching a large global audience as Art3mis and Samantha in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. She then took on varied film roles in Life Itself, Pixie, Little Fish, Naked Singularity, and Sound of Metal. In Sound of Metal, her performance as Lou, a musician and partner to Riz Ahmed's drummer Ruben, formed an important emotional anchor in a film widely praised by critics and awards bodies.