On the fourth chapter of the live-action Star Wars series The Mandalorian, entitled "Sanctuary,"
the series gave fans another reason to love the popular series when it introduced a character
named Omera.
Here's why Julia Jones, the actress who plays her, looks so familiar.
Though it's one of the actress' lesser-known projects, the Larry Bishop-directed, Western-tinged
biker opus Hell Ride is a bold entry in Julia Jones' filmography.
Released in 2008 and produced by none other than Quentin Tarantino, Hell Ride follows
Bishop and Michael Madsen as heads of the Victors biker gang, and finds them entrenched
in a bloody showdown with David Carradine's own Six-Six-Six's gang.
Envisioned as the greatest biker movie ever made by Tarantino and Bishop, Hell Ride doesn't
quite live up to those lofty ambitions, but it's every bit as violent, macho, and subversively
silly as its setup would have you believe.
Hell Ride's B-movie absurdities make for a little slice of grindhouse heaven for cinema
lovers.
If you're among them, you're certain to recognize Jones for her turn as Cherokee Kisum, the
doomed paramour of Bishop's Pistolero.
While Jones doesn't play a major role in the film her character gets offed early in Hell
Ride's gritty action she makes the most of the moment in what was just her third feature
film, ensuring that Cherokee Kisum's spirit casts a long shadow of the film's narrative.
Hell Ride may not have boosted Julia Jones' profile to household name status during the
early days of her career, but it did get her enough notice to land a role in a tentpole
franchise featuring a certain sparkly-skinned vampire.
2010's The Twilight Saga: Eclipse qualified as Jones' first big mainstream break, with
fans around the world taking a liking to her character Leah Clearwater.
"If you're here to torture Jacob some more, feel free to leave."
"Fun, isn't she?"
As a refresher, Eclipse was the first Twilight film to really spend some time with the vampire-hating,
shape-shifting wolf-folk that Bella's bestie-slash-would-be beau Jacob ran around with through much of
the series.
Among those werewolves are Leah and Seth Clearwater.
Jones' Leah is extremely powerful, and was the only woman among the wolf-people to ever
take the form of the animal.
As such, she was immediately named the second-in-command to Jacob's Alpha within the pack.
Though there were a lot of overarching narratives and tons of intricate lore going on in the
film, all you really need to know about Eclipse is that Julia Jones was in it and that she
was really good in what amounted to a relatively thankless role that she continued to play
over the course of the final two, increasingly ridiculous Twilight flicks, Breaking Dawn
Parts 1 and 2.
Luckily, the rather complicated reputation of the Twilight movies didn't prevent Jones
from moving on to better if not bigger things.
In fact, one of Jones' most memorable supporting turns came in the decidedly mid-budget 2017
thriller Wind River.
Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, Wind River unfolds in the icy vistas of Montana,
and sees a troubled tracker named Cory Lambert played by Jeremy Renner attempting to navigate
local and tribal laws while untangling a web of mysteries surrounding the death of his
friend's daughter on a local reservation.
We come to find out that the case is of particular interest to Cory because his own daughter
had been killed in a troubling case years earlier.
In hopes of providing some answers for his old friend, Cory tackles the case head-on
and stirs up some still-raging emotions within himself on the way.
Those emotions are never closer to the surface as they are when Cory visits Wilma, the mother
of his deceased child and his ex-wife, who is memorably played with raw-nerve energy
by you guessed it Julia Jones.
"You've got blood on your shirt."
"Yeah, I just came from work."
"Who was the victim today?"
Though her turn as Wilma in Wind River was short, Jones still brought some serious fire
to the mix.
She rendered a fully-formed character from the abstract fragments of Wilma, and the character
is every bit as wounded and haunted by the past as Cory.
As far as supporting turns go, Jones' work in Wind River isn't quite of the legit scene-stealing
nature, but it's about as close as one can get.
The Mandalorian is hardly Julia Jones' first foray into television.
She got her first taste of the small-screen big time with a four-episode arc as Dr. Kaya
Montoya on the final season of E.R. back in 2008.
Jones also delivered solid work as Gabriella Langton on A&E's Western series Longmire,
and can currently be seen as Stephanie Littlecrow on the Billy Bob Thornton-starring legal drama
Goliath.
Perhaps Jones' most memorable TV appearance was as Kohana on the second season of HBO's
daring, perplexing sci-fi Western Westworld.
As complex and frustrating as Westworld season 2 often was, when the series took a moment
to slow down, it offered wildly inventive, vividly rendered, jaw-droppingly beautiful
glimpses into some of the more intriguing corners of Westworld at large.
One such corner belonged to the doomed park's indigenous people, the Ghost Nation.
And one of those astounding moments came on the eighth episode of Westworld season 2.
Entitled "Kiksuya," the episode proved a bold narrative diversion from the relative chaos
of the season, and followed Zahn McClarnon's Akecheta as he narrates the Ghost Nation's
rise to consciousness.
He does so through the telling of his own dramatic story — a harrowing one of a love
lost and then tragically found.
That story finds Akecheta falling passionately in love with fellow Ghost Nationer Kohana,
only to have her ripped away from him after both characters are reprogrammed by the park's
storytellers.
As the story progresses with Akecheta and Kohana's lives crossing in increasingly devastating
fashion, it does so with almost no dialogue from Kohana a fact that makes Jones' silently
emotive work in the role all the more remarkable, and that adds unimaginable weight to her reading
of the episode's signature line:
"Mi cante ki yu ha ya ye."
"Take my heart when you go."
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