The original version of this article was written by Jess Bacon and published on 29 February 2024.
Rebecca Ferguson has been involved with some of the best TV series and film franchises in recent years, demonstrating the breadth of her range across a variety of genres from Silo to The Greatest Showman. The Stockholm-born actor made her debut in 1999 while still a teenager, in the Swedish language soap opera, Nya tider, before making her feature film debut in the slasher horror, Drowning Ghost, in 2004.
From there, Ferguson has gone from strength to strength, with her more recent recurring roles in the Mission: Impossible and Dune franchises confirming her position as one of the biggest stars to emerge from Hollywood in the last decade. With so many incredible films and TV series to sift through, here are the best Rebecca Ferguson performances and where they’re available for streaming from services like Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
We’ve ranked them not by the quality of each movie, exactly—though that occasionally coincides—but by some combination of Ferguson’s performance and her character’s significance, from the least to most notable.
10. The Greatest Showman (2017)
Despite banking $435 million at the box office and a whole bag of awards (including a nomination for best song at the Oscars), The Greatest Showman is a bit of a hate-it-or-love-it kind of movie. If you’re into fantastical musicals like Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, you’ll probably fall into the latter.
We’ve placed it low here as Ferguson, memorable as she is playing Jenny “Swedish Nightingale” Lind (though former Voice contestant Loren Allred stepped in for the singing), only appears in a supporting role.
9. Dune (2021)
Dune being ninth on this list is not a reflection on the movie itself. Denis Villeneuve’s incredible adaptation of the first half of Frank Herbert’s novel is the kind of dense, mature sci-fi that the director of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 has become synonymous with. Naturally, if you’re a fan of those movies, you will definitely be a fan of this one.
The movie occupies this position on our list as Lady Jessica’s role is relatively smaller than what Fergusson gets to do in Part Two (more on that in a minute). In fact, the actress was initially reluctant to take on the role of Paul Atreidas’s mother (did being only 12 years older than Timothée Chalamet’s have something to do with it?), but Villeneuve eventually convinced her, and we can all be thankful for that.
8. The White Queen (2013)
The White Queen is the show that finally gained Ferguson international prominence, earning the young actress a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a miniseries along the way. Made for the BBC, the ten-part series focuses on King Edward IV’s wife, Elizabeth Woodville (Ferguson), during the War of the Roses.
This is the kind of show that revisits long-discussed historical events from the POV of the women involved. So, if you like punky, period stories told through the female lens (think The Great, The Favourite or Corsage), this is one you’ll want to see.
7. Doctor Sleep (2019)
Long before adapting Stephen King’s The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan made Doctor Sleep, a daring attempt to make a sequel to one of the greatest adaptations of the author’s novels. Fans of King adaptations in general, or those who are curious to see a pretty interesting expansion of the world of The Shining, might be curious to check this one out.
Ewan McGregor stars as a now adult Danny Torrence who finds a young girl who has been cursed with the same gift, but Fergusson steals the show as the evil Rose the Hat.
6. Silo (2023)
Silo is one of those shows that would have been absolutely enormous had it been released before the streaming wars. If you like mystery box series with sci-fi twists, like Lost or the recent adaptation of Fallout, you’ll easily get hooked on its alluring premise.
Set in a dystopian future where human beings are literally siloed underground, Ferguson absolutely kills it in the lead role as Juliette: an engineer whose curiosity puts her on a path to discovering the truth.
5. House of Dynamite (2025)
For some viewers, A House of Dynamite will be a match made in heaven: a movie with the bingeable, gripping pull of a show like 24 mixed with director Katheryn Bigelow’s erudite taste for politically topical subject matter. You’ll lap this up if you’re a fan of her more recent output, especially The Hurt Locker or Zero Dark Thirty.
The movie roughly covers the same half hour, told from three sets of perspectives, to show how the US government might respond to the appearance of a rogue nuclear missile on their radar screens. Fergusson appears in the first of these segments, playing a duty officer in the situation room trying to hold it together through some uncomfortable calls with her son. As usual, she also steals the show.
4. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023)
Rest assured, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning won’t be the only movie in the franchise to feature on this list—though it’s certainly one worth seeing if you like the later instalments of the series and seeing Cruise at his most death-defying.
It’s the first we’ll mention here, however, as Ferguson’s limited screentime as Ilsa Faust means it’s perhaps the least substantial of her performances in the series. That said, she does get to wear an eye patch, shoot an enormous sniper rifle, and have a fateful sword fight on a Venetian bridge. Credit where credit’s due.
3. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
Mission: Impossible - Fallout places higher than Dead Reckoning because a) it might be the best action movie of the decade, and b) because Fergusson, again as Ilsa Faust, gets way more stuff to do.
Over the course of the movie’s substantial running time, Ferguson is involved almost from start to finish, and all the way up to the grand finale, where she gets to fight Solomon Lane to defuse a plutonium core. She also gets to do more flirting with Ethan and ride a motorbike—all of which are crucial factors of this performance’s high ranking on this list.
2. Dune Part Two (2024)
If you liked the vibe of Dune Part 1 but grew a little tired of all the table setting, Dune Part Two is your well-earned reward—an astonishing achievement in mature sci-fi cinema that any fan of that genre needs to see.
Like most other things in Dune Part Two, Ferguson built on what she had achieved with Lady Jessica in Part One and made it even better—evolving into the Reverend Mother, getting some dope face tattoos, drinking the “Water of Life”, and essentially hyping her son into a full-blown Messiah. But hey, isn’t that what all mothers are for?
1. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)
Now we’re talking! Ilsa might have had to face the indignity of playing second fiddle to an overblown pickpocket in later instalments of the Mission Impossible franchise, but her first appearance as Ilsa Faust, in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, is one of the best character portrayals in the entire series.
Director Cristopher McQuarrie certainly knew what he was up to in casting a Swedish-born actress to play a character named Ilsa in a certain Moroccan city, but Ferguson transcended those winks to cinema history to make the character her own. Her emergence from the swimming pool is enough to leave Benji speechless, but it’s Ferguson’s delivery of that line that really sealed her place in the annals of M: I and, IMO, made her a star.
