Kacey Rohl

Kacey Rohl
PerformerCaprica
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Portrays:	Ada
Date of Birth:	August 6,1991
Date of Death:	Missing required parameter 1=month!
Age:	34
Nationality:	CAN
Related Media
		@ BW Media
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IMDb profile

Kacey Rohl (born August 6, 1991, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is a Canadian actress who portrayed Ada in the Caprica episode "Unvanquished".

Career

Caprica and early television and film work (2010–2012)

Rohl appeared as Ada in "Unvanquished," the tenth episode of Caprica, which aired October 5, 2010. Posting on Twitter shortly after the episode aired, Rohl said the character would return in a later episode. While this is true, it is only as reused footage from the episode that shows Clarice Willow's Apotheosis holoband pitch.

That same year, Rohl took guest and supporting roles on several other genre and drama series, playing a character credited as Woman in the V episode "Heretic's Fork," Madeline Stanfield in the Fringe episode "The Plateau," Tabitha in the Lifetime television film Bond of Silence, and Emma Hollings, a spa employee, in the Lifetime television film The Client List alongside Kandyse McClure, Heather Doerksen, and Sonja Bennett. A 2011 wire profile syndicated in several Canadian newspapers described the Client List part as one of several "personality-stretching" roles in which Rohl played characters considerably removed from herself.

In 2011, Rohl made her feature film debut as Prudence in Red Riding Hood, Catherine Hardwicke's dark-fantasy retelling of the fairy tale, opposite Amanda Seyfried. Speaking to The Province from Los Angeles after attending the film's American premiere, Rohl credited Hardwicke's vision for bringing the cast together and called the film "my big break," noting that Hardwicke had cast three local actresses for the supporting roles, herself among them.

That year she was also cast as Sterling Fitch, a recurring character for the first two seasons of the AMC crime drama The Killing. In an interview published shortly after the role was announced, Rohl described Sterling as a traumatized teenager with deep self-esteem issues, and said that despite the difficulty of the part, the character "stuck with me." In the same interview, she discussed having recently joined the puppet-driven mockumentary Sunflower Hour, for which the cast received puppeteering instruction, and said her run of science-fiction guest spots, including Caprica, had drawn her to the genre because of how it could address contemporary political subjects indirectly.

In a separate interview published that June, Rohl said Sterling was concealing a secret she was reluctant to reveal early in the series, and discussed two other projects then in production: Sisters & Brothers, a Carl Bessai-directed film co-starring Cory Monteith and Dustin Milligan that she described as "structured improv," and the shift in pacing she had experienced moving from television to film, noting that Red Riding Hood required more time, lighting, and crew than a television schedule typically allowed. In an interview around the same time, Rohl named The Killing castmate Richard Harmon, who played Jasper Ames, as a peer she hoped to work with again, saying of him, "that kid is a powerhouse."

Hannibal and Working the Engels (2013–2014)

From 2013 to 2015, Rohl recurred as Abigail Hobbs, the daughter of a serial killer, on the NBC crime drama Hannibal. Speaking to the Vancouver Sun shortly after the series premiered, Rohl said the role came about through a connection with director David Slade, with whom she had previously shot an unsold pilot, and that she learned she had been cast while enrolled in a theatre course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London; she recalled getting a text from her agent and "jumping up and breathing so heavily I thought I was going to pass out" in the neighbourhood pub where she received the news. The same interview noted she was then in Chicago filming a pilot for the ABC/Sony drama Doubt, created by David Shore and directed by Thomas Schlamme, in which she played a paralegal. In September 2013, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Rohl, identified in the trade as a Hannibal cast member, had been cast as Jenna Engel, an attorney who takes over her late father's law practice, in the Global Television/NBC co-produced sitcom Working the Engels, starring opposite Andrea Martin as her mother, Ceil. Promoting the series ahead of its March 2014 premiere on Global, reported at the time as the first Canadian-produced sitcom sold to an American network, Rohl described the Engel family as dysfunctional but ultimately supportive of one another. In the same interview, after watching cast members Martin and Martin Short reunite on set, Rohl said, "there's so much history there and so much love." Martin praised the cast and crew as close-knit, and Rohl said she had grown up familiar with Martin's work because her own mother had raised her on female comedians; of working opposite Martin, Rohl said simply, "I loooooove her." Reviewing the series for the San Francisco Chronicle that July, critic David Wiegand praised the cast but faulted the writing, arguing that the scripts wasted Martin's comedic talent and failed to give the rest of the ensemble, including Rohl, material that matched their abilities. Reviewing the series for The Globe and Mail that April, television critic John Doyle was similarly unimpressed with the writing but said he had "nothing against" Rohl, citing her work on Hannibal and The Killing and adding that he hoped to see her in better material. The series ran for a single twelve-episode season on Global in Canada and a truncated run on NBC in the United States before both networks canceled it in August 2014, with Global citing insufficient viewership to justify a second season.

Television work (2016–2019)

In February 2016, Rohl joined the second season of the Fox event series Wayward Pines as Kerry Campbell, a character Deadline described in its casting announcement as part of the show's "brain trust." Around the same time, she also recurred as Marina, a character a 2025 profile in Niagara Frontier Publications described as ill-tempered, on the Syfy series The Magicians. Beginning in late 2017, she recurred as Alena, a computer hacker tied to Felicity Smoak's company Helix, on the The CW superhero series Arrow. In 2018, she starred as Sabrina Swanson, a former high school overachiever whose ten-year reunion is disrupted by a murderous mascot costume, in the Syfy original film Killer High.

White Lie and awards recognition (2019–2020)

In May 2019, Variety reported that the French sales company Playtime had acquired international rights to White Lie, a project in which Rohl's character, a university dance student, raises money from her own classmates by claiming to have cancer, only for her family to begin questioning the deception. Directed by Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas and set in Hamilton, Ontario, the film was discussed by its directors with The Canadian Press as an attempt to make a morally compromised, deceptive protagonist sympathetic without ever fully explaining her motives on screen.

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019, where Rohl was named a TIFF Rising Star, a designation The Canadian Press reported gave participating performers access to industry meetings with casting directors, filmmakers, and producers; the same report noted Rohl was then in production on the CBC spy thriller Fortunate Son. Discussing the physical demands of the role for an online interview around the same time, including having her head shaved on camera, Rohl called it "an awesome opportunity." Reflecting on her career to that point in a separate interview, Rohl said she felt "overflowing gratitude" that acting had become a way to support herself while doing work she loved.

Rohl's performance earned her a Best Actor, Female (Canadian) nomination at the Vancouver Film Critics Circle's 20th annual awards, announced December 13, 2019. She was also nominated for Best Lead Actress (Film) at the 2020 Canadian Screen Awards, one of four nominations the film received overall from the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television. Reviewing the film for the Calgary Herald that July, critic Chris Knight gave it four out of five stars and called Rohl's character "an engaging villain" whose motives the filmmakers left deliberately unresolved through to the film's final scene.

Star Trek: Section 31 (2025)

IndieWire, citing a March 2024 Variety set report, wrote that Rohl had been cast as a young version of Lieutenant Rachel Garrett, a character previously played by Tricia O'Neil in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," for the Paramount+ film Star Trek: Section 31. The film, centered on Michelle Yeoh's Philippa Georgiou, premiered on Paramount+ in January 2025, with the platform's own full-cast listing confirming Rohl in the role of Rachel Garrett.

Rohl's audition unfolded over several rounds before she learned which character she was being considered for; speaking to the Vancouver Sun, she said casting initially asked her to prepare two contrasting interpretations, one more comedic and one more reserved and procedure-following, ahead of a final Zoom callback in the fall of 2023 that mixed scripted scenes with improvisation. She said one of the biggest surprises of the shoot was how much of the film's alien environments were built practically or rendered on augmented-reality screens rather than left to her imagination against a bare set, joking that the approach meant "it wasn't a lot of quietly acting opposite a tennis ball." In a companion interview published the same day, Rohl described Garrett as "a real by-the-book gal" who finds comfort working inside clear rules, while noting that the film leaves ambiguous how much actual authority the character holds within Section 31. In a joint interview with co-star Humberly González published the same week, Rohl called Garrett "a badass with a really strong sense of self," and said she had long joked with her manager about wanting to work on a project set in space, without expecting the joke would eventually be fulfilled by an actual Star Trek role; she also described physically demanding stunt sequences that involved being thrown back and forth in a stationary rig made to simulate motion, after which she would discover unexplained bruises once she was home. In a separate Q&A, Rohl recalled stepping onto one of the production's mission-ship sets for the first time and being moved to tears, joking that she was "knocked on my butt" by the scale of the practical construction.

To prepare, Rohl independently watched all of Star Trek: Discovery to study Yeoh's performance, and said director Olatunde Osunsanmi additionally assigned the cast Mission: Impossible and Crimson Tide (1995) as reference viewing for the ensemble's command dynamics. Of honoring O'Neil's original performance, Rohl said, "those were big boots to fill." In a separate interview at the film's New York premiere, Rohl said playing Starfleet's only on-screen representative in the ensemble carried a particular responsibility, describing the pressure as something that "makes diamonds." She characterized Garrett at the start of the film as a disciplined, rule-following officer who gradually grows more comfortable operating in moral gray areas as the story progresses. In a February 2025 interview, Rohl said she did not learn which character she had auditioned for until after her first round of callbacks, after which the part "became my obsession," prompting her to rewatch "Yesterday's Enterprise" multiple times to study O'Neil's performance before director Olatunde Osunsanmi told her he wanted her own take on the role rather than an impression.

Personal life

Rohl is the daughter of Michael Rohl, a television and film director whose credits include Smallville and Supernatural, and Jan Derbyshore, a playwright and comedian. Rohl has said she began performing as a young child, recalling that she was reciting Hamlet's graveyard soliloquy by age four, and has credited an early acting coach and a teacher who told her a performing career was achievable with giving her the confidence to pursue acting professionally. Aside from one-person plays she put on at home, her first formal production was a school staging of the musical Annie, in which she played the title role at around age seven. She later trained in a theatre course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

References