Why Sasha From The Walking Dead Looks So Familiar

Sonequa Martin-Green (she married actor Kenric Green in 2010, and the two have a son together) spoiler alert ended her five year run as Sasha on AMC's The Walking Dead with a poison pill and a stint in a coffin.

"I thought that was the perfect ending," she told Entertainment Weekly. "I thought it was like that period at the end of a wonderful poem. I mentioned this on Talking Dead, but it was as if all my roles had led me to that moment."

In case the question of where else you've seen Martin-Green, who debuted on The Walking Dead in 2012, has been quietly eating at your soul, the answer is many places. From small independent films that made a big impact, to well-known network shows, here are those roles that prepared Martin-Green for her big Walking Dead moment.

Martin-Green began working in film in 2005, with Not Quite Right, a movie about two high school students who end up doing community service at a mental hospital. In 2007, the year she graduated from college, she had a role in a short film called I-Can-D, which was shot in Martin-Green's home state of Alabama. She went on to play Jenna Lopez in the 2008 short thriller Blind Thoughts, which you can watch on YouTube, probably made available again due to Martin-Green's popularity.

Martin-Green had a big year in 2009 — she was all over the place on television, booked her first feature film, and she also continued to take on other roles in independents such as Rivers Wash Over Me, in which she played Shawna King. Rivers, about a gay black teen who's transplanted from New York City to Alabama after his mother dies, won Best Dramatic Feature at the 2009 Chicago Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, and Derrick L. Middleton, who played the lead role of Sequan Greene, won the Grand Jury Award at the 2009 LA Outfest.

Martin-Green made her feature film debut in Emily Abt's Toe to Toe as Tosha, a scholarship student in hot pursuit of the Ivy League, whose friendship with another player (Louise Krause) on her high school lacrosse team is tested by issues of privilege, sexuality, class, and race. The Washington Post dubbed Martin-Green's performance in the film, which debuted at Sundance in 2009, "an exceptionally promising debut as a young woman of catlike composure and self-possession."

Martin-Green also booked her first recurring role on television in 2009—a three episode stint during the third season of Lifetime's Army Wives. She played Kanessa Jones, a young woman who's recruited to join the army by Lieutenant Trevor LeBlanc (Drew Fuller).

While Jones is reticent at first, telling Lieutenant LeBlanc her focus has to be on taking care of her family, she eventually does join — after kicking ass in various trainings and getting a pep talk from Joan (Wendy Davis), who tells her that joining the Army changed the trajectory of her life for the better.

Continuing to kill it in 2009, Martin-Green showed up on CBS's The Good Wife, easily one of the most well received dramas on television, alongside Julianna Margulies, Josh Charles, Christine Baranski, Archie Panjabi, and her future Walking Dead co-star (and nemesis), Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

Martin-Green played Courtney Wells, a paralegal and assistant at Alicia Florrick's (Margulies) firm, whose duties, and often loyalties, were divided between Alicia and fellow Junior Associate Cary (Matt Czuchry). Courtney appeared in eight episodes, beginning in Season 1, and was last seen in Season 2, episode 23 in 2011. But then she inexplicably disappeared. Although Martin-Green was 24 at the time, The Good Wife marked the first time she played an adult in television or film.

Where Martin-Green showed up next was in the drama Yelling to the Sky. She played Jojo Parker, friend to the film's protagonist, Sweetness O'Hara (Zoe Kravitz), a teenager with an unstable family who's tasked with the job of extricating herself from her neighborhood on her own. The film, directed by Victoria Mahoney, skipped Sundance to premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011.

In 2012, Martin-Green was part of the cast of CBS's short-lived CSI: Miami's mid-season replacement — NYC 22. The show, executive-produced by Robert De Niro, followed a newly minted crop of NYPD officers as they patrolled Upper Manhattan, dealing with issues of excessive force, gang wars, racism, and corruption, while being hazed by their superiors.

The cast included Leelee Sobieski, Adam Goldberg, Judy Marte, Stark Sands, Tom Reed, as well as Martin-Green, who played Michelle Terry, the sister of T-Rex, a gang member who narrowly escapes arrest by Officer McLaren (Sands). The series folded after 13 episodes, and the next time we'd see Martin-Green, she'd be battling zombies in Season 3 of The Walking Dead.

In case you arrived late to The Walking Dead party, you might recognize Martin-Green from a role she had simultaneously — playing Tamara on ABC's Once Upon a Time. Martin-Green joined the cast of TWD just before the show's Season 3 hiatus, and began portraying Tamara in Season 2, Episode 15 of Once Upon a Time, called "The Queen Is Dead."

Tamara was billed as a "mysterious" character, and the fact that Martin-Green was already signed on as part of TWD made her addition to the show even more interesting. Since characters on Once Upon a Time were now able to leave the mythical Storybrooke, it was unclear whether or not Tamara could be expected to stick around.

Viewers learned that Tamara was actually the mysterious "Her" in Greg Mendell's phone, and the two had various nefarious plans for the citizens of Storybrooke. Martin-Green spent seven episodes wreaking havoc before she and Grdg absconded to Neverland.

In 2014's independent science fiction thriller Shockwave Darkside, Martin-Green plays Private Lang, one of five soldiers trapped on the dark side of the moon, with only 36 hours of oxygen left, when their ship is shot down amid a war for water due to a nano-plague. The 3D film, which premiered at the 2014 London FrightFest, is based on a 2011 web comic of the same name. It was filmed over 18 nights in May 2010 in a sandpit on Cape Cod, and when asked about the budget, director Jay Weisman said, "Not at liberty to say. Less than Avatar."

Martin-Green worked with director Emily Abt when she starred in tge 2009 film Toe to Toe, about tensions between two friends on the same lacrosse team at an elite Maryland private school. Abt, one of the founders of Pureland Pictures, a Brooklyn-based film production company, also directed the short (12-minute) film On the Bridge, which again starred Martin-Green, as well as her real life husband, Kenric Green. Green, who wrote the film with Abt, also joined the cast of The Walking Dead alongside his wife in 2015.

While Martin-Green is fabulous in movies and TV alike, it seems that TV guest appearances are her bread and butter. Her break-out role came in 2008, when she appeared on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, playing Kiana Richmond in an episode called "Legacy." Richmond is a student at an elite private school who ends up ensnared in a murder investigation when her plot to take revenge on a classmate ends up going very wrong. Martin-Green's character has attitude for days when she's questioned by Goren and Eames about her possible role in the hanging death of a kid who made an unflattering video of Richmond and a friend. But she saves the most serious ire for her father, an uptight Park Avenue lawyer. It's actually the first time Martin-Green played a lacrosse player; the second was in the 2009 film Toe to Toe.

In 2011, in addition to The Good Wife, Martin-Green appeared in an episode of The CW's tawdry drama about rich and beautiful people, Gossip Girl, as Joanna, who escorts the haughty and perpetually scheming Blair Waldorf through the technicalities of Jenny Packham's deconstructed fashion show. Sadly, we never saw Joanna again after Season 5's "The Jewel of Denial."

Martin-Green left drama behind for a moment in 2016, when she popped up in two episodes of Fox's New Girl, as Winston's (Lamorne Morris) girlfriend, Rhonda, an Army officer who's a little too into pranks. In March 2016, she competed in Spike TV's Lip Sync Battle against her Walking Dead co-star Lauren Cohan. In spite of zombies overtaking the stage during her performance of "Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)" by Silento, she triumphed.

While Martin-Green may no longer be part of The Walking Dead, fans can rest assured that it won't be the last time you see her on TV.