Archie Panjabi

Career[edit]

Panjabi has appeared in film and television, from early appearances in the 1999 comedy film East is East to the BBC television series Life on Mars. Her first Hollywood role, as a British diplomat, was in the Oscar-winning The Constant Gardener, released in 2005. One of her highest profile film roles was in the 2002 comedy release Bend It Like Beckham. Panjabi then landed the role of witty and wisecracking office colleague Gemma in the 2006 Ridley Scott-directed romantic comedy A Good Year, alongside Russell Crowe and Marion Cotillard.


Panjabi next appeared in 2007 with Angelina Jolie in the film adaptation of A Mighty Heart, a book by Mariane Pearl, wife of the journalist Daniel Pearl. Panjabi played the role of former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani. In 2008, she played the role of Chandra Dawkin in Traitor.


She provided the voices for several characters in the British children's television animation Postman Pat.^[8] She lent her voice to the video game Dead Space: Extraction. Panjabi appeared on the BBC Four World Cinema Award show in February 2008, arguing the merits of five international hits such as The Lives of Others and Pan's Labyrinth with Jonathan Ross and Christopher Eccleston. In 2009 she portrayed an MI5 agent in the French movie Espion(s), and in the same year she joined the cast of the new CBS television series The Good Wife as Kalinda Sharma, for which she won a Primetime Emmy Award. Panjabi is the first actor of Indian descent to win an Emmy award.^{[9][10][11][12]}


In 2010, she played Saamiya Nasir in the British comedy The Infidel. On 28 May 2012, she was cast as pathologist Tanya Reed Smith in BBC Two drama series The Fall.^[13] Panjabi appeared as Blaise in the BBC World Service radio series Westway. After leaving The Good Wife in 2015, she guest starred in Fox comedy series Brooklyn Nine-Nine. She joined the cast of Shetland series 3.^[14]


In 2016, it was announced that she will star in ABC anthology drama series The Jury as the show's protagonist, Kim Dempsey.^[15] She also joined the cast of NBC drama Blindspot.^[16]


In December 2017 Panjabi commented in The Daily Telegraph on the improvement for offers of parts for actors from ethnic groups "I think there's definitely been an acknowledgement of there being a lack of diversity...".^[17] In an interview with The Guardian in February 2018, subsequent to her The Good Wife success, Panjabi ruefully recalled "A US talent agent once told me an Indian woman could never have a career in Hollywood".^[18] She also starred as Reece Shearsmith's third love interest, in the ITV drama The Widower, first aired in August 2019. She started on TNT's drama Snowpiercer in Season three in 2022.


In May 2021, Panjabi voiced Depa Billaba in the series premiere of Star Wars: The Bad Batch,^[19]