Trying to describe the Karen Gillan filmography to someone who hasn’t been paying attention is hard!
She’s the woman who played a time-travelling companion on Doctor Who, then shaved her head to play an abused cyborg assassin in the MCU, then anchored a billion-dollar family comedy franchise, then went home to Inverness and wrote a film about suicide in the Scottish Highlands, then showed up in a Stephen King adaptation directed by Mike Flanagan. That’s daring!
Gillan has spent her time making sure no lane sticks long enough to define her. Right now, in 2026, she is simultaneously filming Jumanji 3 in Hawaii, shooting the Highlander reboot in her home country, and prepping a supernatural horror thriller in New York. Three genres, three continents, zero overlap. The Karen Gillan movie conversation isn’t about what she does. It’s about how much of it she can do at once!
Quick Facts: Karen Gillan
| Full Name | Karen Sheila Gillan |
| Date of Birth | November 28, 1987 |
| Birthplace | Inverness, Scotland |
| Known For | Guardians of the Galaxy, Jumanji, Doctor Who, The Life of Chuck |
| Current Projects | Jumanji: Open World, Highlander, Blasphemous |
| Signature MCU Role | Nebula (2014–2023, 6 films) |
| Directorial Debut | The Party’s Just Beginning (2018) |
| Notable Co-stars | Dwayne Johnson, Chris Pratt, Matt Smith, Jack Black, Clive Owen |
5 Reasons Karen Gillan Always Says Yes to Hollywood’s Weirdest Roles
1. From Villain to Legend: How One MCU Role Defined a Decade of Karen Gillan
Here is the thing people forget about Karen Gillan-Nebula: when she first appeared in Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014, there was absolutely no reason to believe this character would amount to anything more than a mid-tier antagonist with a cool look and a couple of fight scenes. Nebula was the less interesting daughter of Thanos, a secondary villain in somebody else’s ensemble comedy, and the role could very easily have dead-ended right there. Instead, she built a complete psychological arc for a character who never got her own movie.
Across nine years and six films, from Guardians through Endgame through Vol. 3, she took Nebula from snarling antagonist to such an emotionally resolved figure in the entire franchise. The ‘Karen Gillan-Nebula-MCU’ run required her to carry a consistent emotional through-line while appearing for maybe twenty minutes every couple of years in someone else’s story, and somehow make the audience feel the weight of everything that happened to this character between appearances. That is a trick that most actors with standalone trilogies can’t pull off. Gillan did it!
2. At 30, Karen Gillan Wrote, Directed, and Starred in a Suicide Prevention Film — And It Changed Everything
Between MCU commitments, between Jumanji press tours, between every reasonable expectation of what a young actor at her commercial peak should be doing with her time, Karen Gillan went home to Inverness and made The Party’s Just Beginning. The film is about the disproportionately high suicide rate in the Scottish Highlands — a subject drawn directly from the community she grew up in. She wrote it. She directed it.
She played the lead. It was nominated for Best Feature Film at the British Academy Scotland Awards. It is not a crowd-pleaser. It is not a calling card for bigger directing gigs. It is the kind of project an actor makes when they have something to say that none of their blockbuster roles will let them say, and the fact that she made it at 30, sandwiched between Infinity War and Endgame, tells you more about her creative priorities than any franchise credit ever could.
3. No One Does Genre Range Like Karen Gillan (And Here’s Why That Matters)
Pull up the Karen Gillan filmography and try to find the pattern. Karen Gillan in Doctor Who is a sci-fi television series. Oculus is a psychological horror. Karen Gillan, Jumanji is a family blockbuster. Gunpowder Milkshake is neon-lit action. Dual is a bone-dry dystopian thriller. The Life of Chuck is a Stephen King literary adaptation. Blasphemous, a supernatural horror. The pattern is that there is no pattern.
Gillan doesn’t have one genre, and that absence has become its own kind of brand. When the full range of Karen Gillan movies spans from shaving her head for a Marvel villain to directing a micro-budget Scottish drama about mental health, you’re not looking at versatility in the usual sense. You’re looking at an actor who has made a deliberate, sustained decision to never let any single thing she does become the thing she’s known for.
4. Highlander Isn’t Just Another Role — It’s the Full-Circle Moment Karen Gillan Was Built For
Karen Gillan was born in Inverness. She filmed her directorial debut in Inverness. And now she is filming the Highlander reboot — a franchise built on Scottish mythology, rooted in the Highlands, dripping with the exact kind of ancestral drama that the landscape practically demands near her hometown. The Karen Gillan Highlander role is Connor MacLeod’s first wife, and she described the casting as ‘a beautiful, full circle moment,’ which is about as understated as you can be when the universe hands you a part that literally takes you home.
The Highlander franchise has been stuck in development hell for over a decade, churning through scripts and directors and false starts. The fact that it has finally reached actual cameras, with Gillan in the cast, is the most concrete sign yet that this reboot has genuine momentum behind it. For Gillan, it’s the rare Highlander credit that connects her commercial career back to the personal one.
5. Jumanji 3 Returns Karen Gillan to Her Biggest Non-MCU Franchise — And Fans Are Ready
The numbers on this franchise are ridiculous and worth restating: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle grossed $962 million worldwide in 2017. The Next Level pulled $795 million in 2019. Those are not cult numbers. Those are global event movie numbers, and Gillan’s Ruby Roundhouse was a major reason both films worked as well as they did — she brought a physical comedy instinct to the role that grounded the absurdity and gave the ensemble a tonal anchor it badly needed.
Now, is Karen Gillan in Jumanji 3? She absolutely is. Jumanji: Open World is filming in Oahu with the full returning core cast — Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Gillian, plus the addition of Danny DeVito, for a planned December 2026 release. This is the first major franchise test of her post-MCU career, and the stakes are specific: can she build a second blockbuster identity now that the Nebula chapter has closed? The Karen Gillan movie pipeline suggests she’s not especially worried about the answer.
The Karen Gillan Deep Dive
Who is Karen Gillan, actually?
Is Karen Gillan Scottish? Thoroughly, unapologetically Scottish. Born November 28, 1987, in Inverness, Scotland. She grew up as an only child in the Highlands, studied at Edinburgh’s Telford College before moving to London to attend the Italia Conti Academy. Her first professional credit was a cameo on Rebus, the ITV crime series. Then came two years on The Kevin Bishop Show doing sketch comedy and celebrity impressions — a fact that tends to surprise people who only know her from blockbusters, but which makes complete sense once you see the physical comedy instincts she brings to every role.
She was cast as Amy Pond on Doctor Who in 2009, the companion to Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, and stayed through 2013. That run made her famous. Everything that followed made her interesting. The Inverness upbringing, the sketch training, the genre-first career trajectory — all of it points in the same direction: this is an actor who built serious technical range before anyone in the industry thought to ask her to.
2. The creative challenge of building Nebula across nine years
What makes the MCU arc genuinely impressive isn’t the duration — plenty of actors have hung around the Marvel machine for a decade. Nebula had no usable backstory from the comics that translated cleanly to the screen. Gillan and the Guardians writing team had to build the character’s entire interior life from scratch: the trauma of being Thanos’s less-favoured daughter, the body horror of being cybernetically rebuilt as punishment for failure, and the slow, stubborn climb toward something resembling redemption.
All of it had to be constructed across six films in which she was never the lead, never the focus, and rarely on screen for more than twenty minutes at a stretch. Gillan has said she kept detailed psychological notes on Nebula between productions to maintain consistency. You watch the arc play out and realise she’s telling the truth.
Gillan’s own words on her choices
When she talks about her career, Gillan is disarmingly direct about the logic behind it. On The Party’s Just Beginning, she has consistently described it as the project she’s most personally invested in — the one that reflects the community she grew up in. On Karen Gillan’s Highlander role, she called the casting ‘a beautiful, full circle moment’ and has posted extensively from the Scottish shoot.
On the genre diversity that defines the Karen Gillan filmography, she’s been refreshingly blunt: she actively seeks out projects that feel unlike whatever she just finished. It’s a creative philosophy that shows up in every choice she makes — she doesn’t stay in any lane long enough for the industry to mistake it for a permanent address.
Behind the Scenes: The Production Choices Shaping Karen Gillan’s Next Era
Jumanji: Open World — What We Know About the Production So Far
Filming is underway on Oahu, Hawaii. Planned release: December 2026, distributed by Sony Pictures. The full core cast is back — Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Karen Gillan — with Danny DeVito joining as a new addition. Is Karen Gillan in Jumanji 3? She’s already on set. This is the third instalment of the reboot franchise that started in 2017, and with the first two films combining for over $1.7 billion worldwide, the commercial expectations are enormous.
Production Breakdown: What Highlander and Blasphemous Reveal About Her Range
Highlander is a reboot of the 1986 franchise, currently filming in Scotland. Gillan plays Connor MacLeod’s first wife — the Karen Gillan Highlander role that puts her inside one of genre cinema’s most iconic mythologies. The franchise spent over a decade in development hell before finally reaching cameras; this production appears to be the real thing.
Blasphemous is a supernatural thriller written and directed by Luke Piotrowski, the writer of 2022’s Hellraiser, co-starring Josh Hutcherson and Clive Owen. It comes from the production company behind the John Wick franchise, the script landed on the 2023 Black List, and production is set to begin in New York in August 2026. Between the Scottish mythology of Highlander and the genre pedigree of Blasphemous, Gillan’s 2026 dance card reads like a deliberate attempt to prove she can hold the centre of a genre film without a Marvel logo attached to it.
Post-MCU, Pre-Next Chapter: How Karen Gillan Is Rewriting Her Own Career Script
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 closed the Nebula arc in 2023 after nine years. The post-MCU data points so far include The Life of Chuck and Sleeping Dogs, both from 2024, are smaller, character-driven projects that suggest an actor deliberately recalibrating after a long stretch of franchise work.
The 2026 slate changes the conversation. Jumanji 3, Highlander, Blasphemous — that’s the first major commercial and genre statement of her post-MCU career, and the open question it poses is the interesting one: can Karen Gillan build a second franchise identity, or is her value to Hollywood something more unusual than that — a range so wide that no single property can contain it? The Karen Gillan movie pipeline says she’s not waiting around for the industry to decide. She’s answering the question herself.
Movies and TV: Full Filmography
| Title | Year | Format | Role |
Notes |
| Jumanji: Open World | 2026 | Film | Ruby Roundhouse | Sony. Filming in Hawaii. Dec 2026 release. |
| Highlander | 2026 | Film | Connor MacLeod’s wife | Lionsgate. Filming in Scotland. |
| Blasphemous | 2026 | Film | TBA | Supernatural thriller. Black List script. Aug 2026 prod start. |
| The Life of Chuck | 2024 | Film | Felicia | Stephen King adaptation. Dir. Mike Flanagan. |
| Sleeping Dogs | 2024 | Film | Laura Baines | Russell Crowe co-star. |
| Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 | 2023 | Film | Nebula | Marvel/Disney. Final Guardians film. |
| Dual | 2022 | Film | Sarah / Sarah’s Double | Dir. Riley Stearns. Dystopian thriller. |
| Gunpowder Milkshake | 2021 | Film | Sam | Action. Netflix. |
| Jumanji: The Next Level | 2019 | Film | Ruby Roundhouse | Sony. $795M worldwide. |
| Avengers: Endgame | 2019 | Film | Nebula | Marvel/Disney. $2.8B worldwide. |
| The Party’s Just Beginning | 2018 | Film | Liusaidh | Also wrote and directed. BAFTA Scotland nom. |
| Avengers: Infinity War | 2018 | Film | Nebula | Marvel/Disney. |
| Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle | 2017 | Film | Ruby Roundhouse | Sony. $962M worldwide. |
| Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 | 2017 | Film | Nebula | Marvel/Disney. |
| Oculus | 2013 | Film | Kaylie Russell | Horror. Dir. Mike Flanagan. |
| Guardians of the Galaxy | 2014 | Film | Nebula | Marvel/Disney. First MCU appearance. |
| Doctor Who | 2010–2013 | TV | Amy Pond | BBC. Companion to the Eleventh Doctor. |
| The Kevin Bishop Show | 2008–2009 | TV | Various | Channel 4. Sketch comedy. |
Conclusion
Karen Gillan built nine years of MCU credibility and used the capital to make a micro-budget Scottish film about suicide in the Highlands. That single sentence contains more information about who she is as an artist than any franchise credit on her CV. Jumanji 3, Highlander, and Blasphemous will tell us what the next decade of Karen Gillan movies looks like, but the pattern so far is clear: whoever tries to put her in a box is going to be wrong, and she’s going to enjoy watching them figure that out.
