Why Vic From NOS4A2 Looks So Familiar
NOS4A2 is perfect binge fare, a supernatural story that doesn't ask its viewers for much. If you want to watch a green vampire hunter come to grips with the supernatural while trying to stop an immortal evil being, then it's just the ticket.
While the plot is easy to follow and the world of Strong Creatives is deeply entertaining, one thing has lingered on viewers' minds: Where have I seen Vic before? The series' lead spends an entire season forging connections, be they portals from her hometown to other parts of the country or friendships with fellow super-powered folks. In the real world, however, the jump between synapses that could tell you the origin of a familiar face can be an uncrossable chasm.
Fear not, because we have the answers. If you've seen the actress who plays Vic before, it was likely in the 2010 movie Tomorrow, When The War Began.
NOS4A2's Ashleigh Cummings played Robyn in the 2010 film
Fans can be forgiven for head-scratching over where exactly they've seen actress Ashleigh Cummings. Her best-known role outside of her home of Australia came nearly a decade ago, when she played Robyn Mathers in Tomorrow, When The War Began.
For the unfamiliar, the film is a bit of an Australian take on Red Dawn. Based on a series of young adult books, it follows a group of teenagers as they are forced to defend their home from a coalition of invaders.
Where Red Dawn was steeped in Cold War paranoia and featured Colorado kids fighting off the armies of Cuba and the Soviet Union, Tomorrow's antagonists are an alliance of Asian countries drawn to Australia for its natural resources.
In the film, a group of soon-to-be college students return from a backpacking trip in the Outback to discover that their rural town has been taken over. The deeply fatalist movie shows the group of teens becoming a guerrilla force, fighting against their much-better prepared occupiers as their numbers dwindle. It ends with the kids successfully pulling off a plot to blow up the bridge into town and disrupt the military's supply lines, at the cost of several of the core group's lives.
If you've watched Oceanic television, you may have seen Ashleigh Cummings
In between Tomorrow and the first season of NOS4A2, Cummings stayed in her own backyard. She showed up on Australian soap operas and several different mini-series, and had a long-running role on Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.
Her most-recent gig, before snagging the lead in AMC's hit show, was as a series regular on the New Zealand comic-drama Westside. A prequel to the series Outrageous Fortune, it rapidly moved through the '70s and '80s in New Zealand, and set up the story of the West crime family. It's not the first time that Cummings has kicked about in the fictionalized 1970s, either. Attentive fans will know that she played a crucial role in the Australian coming-of-age drama Puberty Blues.
Still, it's not a stretch to say that Vic on NOS4A2 is the first role into which Cummings has had a chance to really sink her teeth, as far as international audiences are concerned. Fans are clearly loving it, and they'll get the chance to see more of her when the show returns for a second season on June 21, 2020.