Sarayu Blue (“I Feel Bad”)

Whether she was a supporting character on the CW’s short-lived “No Tomorrow” or one of the parents in Warner Bros.’ “Blockers,” Blue was a scene stealer. Audiences took notice, as did “I Feel Bad” executive producers Amy Poehler, Aseem Batra and Julie Anne Robinson, and Blue landed the lead in NBC’s new comedy.

When she started acting, Blue says it was “significant for an Indian-American just to squeeze one’s way onto the little screen,” but now she is getting the chance to play an Indian- American woman who is “human and fully realized [and] both culturally specific and relatable.”

While that kind of representation excites her, she acknowledges a desire to affect even more change with the platform being an actor gives her. “Some of the best ways I know how right now are advocacy, mentorship, and amplification,” Blue says, citing Michelle Obama’s words about reaching back once you’ve walked through a door of opportunity.

“There are a lot of brilliantly talented people out there who simply need a platform to shine. That’s something I certainly relate to, and I’ll be reaching my hand back, because there are so many  stories that need to be told. There are so many stories that we all need to hear.”

Agency: CAA

Management: D2 Management

Will Catlett (“Love Is ___”)

Catlett is no stranger to playing two very different roles at the same time, having worked on the YouTube series “That Guy” and “First,” the latter on Issa Rae’s channel. The pattern follows with his roles on the CW’s “Black Lightning” and OWN’s upcoming “Love Is___.”

“I like to draw a clear line, if I can, between whatever roles I’m playing,” Catlett says. “I look for things that speak to me. I’m always trying to find how this role is going to speak to humanity.”

For both TV series, Catlett works with creators and executive producers Salim Akil and Mara Brock Akil to further flesh out his characters. In “Love Is___” he even plays a character inspired by Salim. But he also finds inspiration in “all of the greats” in his field of acting, from Sidney Poitier to Clark Gable to Meryl Streep. Overall, the most important thing for him, though, is authenticity.

“Is it real? Can you feel something that’s beyond just what you’re watching to help you look at your life — it may be a mirror for you,” he says of his criteria for choosing projects. “That’s the goal for me and why I act. If I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t want to do this.”

Agency: Bold Talent

Management: KD TalentManagement

Legal: Terrence J. Williams

Harriet Dyer (“The InBetween”)

For Dyer, “The InBetween” was the culmination of a whole series of firsts: first pilot season, first lead role and first pilot picked up to series — not to mention her first role on American television.

“It’s that 1% story, like an urban legend that that kind of stuff can happen,” says Dyer, an Australia native, who stars as a clairvoyant helping the police to solve murders.

It was also her first time trying out an American accent, and while she originally had plans of fully immersing herself in it, “I wanted to try to get to know everyone and be a good captain, and I found the best way to do that was to be myself,” she says, noting that off-camera she returned to her Aussie roots.

After years of working in Australian entertainment and theater, Dyer was initially shocked by the size and scope of doing the NBC show.

“This girl walked up to me who looked just like me and said ‘I’m your stand-in,’ and I didn’t know what that meant,” she says. “I thought having a stand- in meant I was lazy or something, because in Australia you’re used to doing everything. I mean I’ve held lights on set in Australia, everyone just kind of has seven jobs, and here there’s seven people to do one job.”

Agency: UTA, RGM Artists (Australia)

Management: Atlas Artists

Legal: Jackoway Austen Tyerman

Daniel Ezra (“All American”)

Birmingham, U.K.-born Ezra has worked on quite a few TV series across the pond, including crime thrillers “Prey” and “Prime Suspect 1973,” but now he’s the leading man in “All-American,” inspired by pro linebacker Spencer Paysinger.

Despite not having grown up with American football, Ezra found a lot to relate to in his character, a high school athlete from a lower-income neighborhood who gets the opportunity to play for a school in a higher-income district.

“I know what it is to be faced with a decision that could mean everything changes, but it doesn’t make it any easier,” Ezra says. “I related to Spencer in how much he wanted it, but also what it means to leave his mom behind — to leave his community and family behind — to go and chase something you want.”

Although Ezra’s father is a fitness coach, and he’s used to going to the gym regularly, he admits he has to take his routine “to another level…not just for the part, but to survive the shoot” now. After all, American series have more episodes and therefore longer production schedules than his past U.K. projects.

Ezra, who considers Denzel Washington “probably the closest thing to an acting hero” that he has, also wants to be known for what he’s doing onscreen (and on stage), rather than his personal life. But what he is passionate about in both has collided on “All- American,” which explores issues of race, class and inclusion.

“It’s nice to be in a show that I feel like is going to be in that conversation and will hopefully help move the conversation forward,” Ezra says. “We’ve just got a really exciting story to tell that couldn’t be more relevant.”

Agency: Curtis Brown Group

Legal: Peikoff Mahan

Maya Hawke (“Little Women,” “Stranger Things”)

As the daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, Hawke knew the upsides and downsides to fame from a young age and that, she admits, “made me more wary of becoming a part of it.” But, she says, “at a certain point, my love of the non-industry aspect, my love of performing, outweighed some of the concerns I had.”

This year, the actress makes her debut in two major projects — PBS’ “Little Women” and as a new addition to season three of “Stranger Things” — which she says could not have been more different.

For “Little Women,” Hawke says she was “in such a far away place with all sorts of people my own age, and it was a lot of our first big jobs, a lot of our first big responsibilities,” while with the Netflix series, “there’s nothing about this show that’s lying on my shoulders. I have to do a good job but it’s not dependent on me. I just get to join it and ride the wave.”

Taking on the iconic book in her first major role, where she plays Jo, Hawke says her biggest challenge was “keeping the period alive in my body so I didn’t betray her or the time, while still allowing my natural instinct — whatever it is that makes me, me — to flow through.”

Agency: CAA

Management: Untitled Entertainment

Elizabeth Lail (“You”)

When Lail booked the role of Princess Anna on “Once Upon a Time,” it was her first job and it came with an “extreme learning curve,” she says. But fast-forward just a few years and now she is the female lead in the twisted love story “You,” adapted from Caroline Kepnes’ novel.

“I feel like I am moving up in my career, but I am now a freshman in the next level,” Lail says.

Inspired to be an actor because of how film, television and theater allows their audiences to “escape into their stories…experience the whole gamut of emotions and learn from other people’s experiences,” Lail has looked for projects that would reveal the human condition and give people a place to express different sides of themselves.

“You” is a darker tale that deals with issues of sexual harassment and stalking, which Lail thinks speaks to the “truth of where we are right now as a society,” even though the first few episodes, she notes, were written before the launch of #MeToo.

“I am attracted to people’s struggles to deal with life,” she says. “I think there’s something really healthy about expressing yourself and the more healthily we can learn to express the truth and our emotions, hopefully the healthier our society will be.”

Agency: ICM

Management: Authentic Talent & Literary Management

Jeanine Mason (“Roswell, New Mexico”)

Mason first entered the Hollywood spotlight as winner of the fifth season of “So You Think You Can Dance,” but since has transitioned into acting, most recently with her starring role on “Roswell, New Mexico” as a woman who discovers that her teenage crush, who went on to become a police officer, is an alien.

She says she wanted the part immediately after reading an early script where someone asks her character, “Why are you being so combative?”

“She says back, ‘I’m a Mexican-American woman in 2018, I engage in combat just by getting out of bed in the morning,’” Mason says. “And I went ‘F—, I need this job so bad right now.’ Everything about it just spoke to me in that one line.”

Mason, who is Cuban- American, plays a character with undocumented parents on “Roswell” after her role of Sam Bello on “Grey’s Anatomy,” who was also undocumented. The actress says she feels these stories are important because “if we can see these people and see how they are struggling to maintain normalcy in their lives and that they are positive additions to our communities, and they’re just trying to better their lives and the lives of their children, it’s only going to help us in the long run.”

Agency: WME

Management: 3 Arts

Legal: Gang Tyre

Joy Nash (“Dietland”)

When Nash first heard about the role of Plum Kettle on “Dietland,” she thought there was no way she’d get an audition, let alone the lead role.

“The best I could hope for is someone sees my audition and they write me a tiny part,” she says of her mindset before she went on to land the role of a ghostwriter at a fashion magazine who gets involved in a sinister plot.

Nash shares that she had “never read anything remotely like” the part of Plum, a woman who was overweight but still “went on a journey and was treated like a human.

“She’s complicated, she’s complex, she’s not always the hero, she’s not the butt of the joke. It’s a great character and if you had taken her weight out of the character description she’s still an incredible character that anyone would want to play,” Nash says.

The actress, who’s had previous parts on “Twin Peaks,” “The Mindy Project” and “The Fosters,” also spoke about relating to her character and bringing Plum Kettle to life off the page, saying, “I hope to make her a human; she’s a real person. All of the things that have happened to her have happened to me in one way or another, and I was really excited to share that part of me.”

Agency: ICM 

Jack Reynor (“Strange Angel”)

After building a career in film, with projects like “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” “Glassland,” “Free Fire” and “Macbeth,” Reynor is heading to the small screen for the first time with “Strange Angel.”

“I was for a long time pretty skeptical about doing TV, and now that there’s so much great content out there and TV has had this kind of rebirth in a way, I was really interested to start reading pilots,” he says.

Reynor was drawn in by the role of Jack Parsons, a real-life rocket scientist and occultist who performed sex magic rituals by night. In preparation, the longtime fan of science fiction and space dove into research about the man and the book the series is based on, “Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons.” His biggest challenge, though, came in adapting a character from the 1940s to today’s world.

“I’ve been trying to channel a lot of what I’ve read about Jack Parsons, but also it’s 2018, and the performance has to be something that calls people’s attention now,” he says. “We have a different way of speaking, we have a different way of being.”

Following his TV debut, Reynor returns to the big screen later this year with “Mowgli” and “On the Basis of Sex.”

Agency: WME, MacFarlane Chard (U.K.)
Legal: Sloane, Offer, Weber & Dern

Saniyya Sidney (“The Passage”)

Sidney first “started bugging” her parents to be on television when she was only 4 years old.

“I would watch the kid shows and think, ‘Why am I not doing that?’” she says, adding that she began to memorize all of the lines of the episodes to feel like she was a part of it, too.

A year later, Sidney’s parents enrolled her in an acting class, which led to her first role in a short film. Just a few years later, she booked roles in “Fences” and “Hidden Figures,” as well as the remake of “Roots.” Now she’s poised to break out opposite Mark-Paul Gosselaar in Fox’s adaptation of Justin Cronin’s “The Passage.”

What Sidney says she loves most about acting is to have the chance to inspire people. But what most excites her about moving more permanently into television is to work on her craft “constantly, and challenge myself over and over again” with the same character.

“My responsibility as an actor is to help the audience feel everything that the character feels,” Sidney says. “I believe that if I can actually accomplish that in every scene I do, and tell a great story, I just may be able to inspire someone to strive and do something special with their dreams, too.”

Agency: Abrams Artists
Management: LA Management

Michele Weaver (“Love Is ___”)

Weaver enjoyed performing from a young age but considered herself an “academic person” and originally planned to go through a more traditional program in college. At the last minute, though, she ended up applying to performing arts schools.

“At that point, my goal when I decided to go to school for theater was really to be a storyteller,” Weaver says. “I just loved the art form of telling stories in different mediums.”

In “Love Is___,” Weaver has a chance to play a storyteller, too. Her character, Nuri, is based on series creator Mara Brock Akil’s real experiences working in Hollywood and falling in love with fellow writer-producer Salim Akil.

Playing a character based on her boss did come with an added level of pressure because “there were certain moments that I had to hit right because they actually happened to her,” Weaver says. But, she adds, there was a common thread that helped her find the honesty in the role.

Now, Weaver wants to use her platform to continue to give back: She has collaborated with a school in Haiti, as well as a non- profit with a focus on growing artists.

“It’s a gift to be able to have a career in acting because it is my passion but it is also a door to be able to do other things that are also in my heart,” she says.

Agency: Gersh

Management: Luber Roklin