You probably know her as the woman who can wither an entire space station with a single, kohl-rimmed glare. Honestly, trying to imagine The Expanse without Camina Drummer is like trying to imagine a burger without the bun—it just falls apart. But while that role turned her into a sci-fi icon, Cara Gee movies and tv shows cover a lot more ground than just the Belt.
She’s a powerhouse. She’s an Ojibwe actor from Calgary who basically walked onto a film set for the first time and immediately bagged a "Best Actress" nomination. That's not normal. Usually, people spend years doing "Background Extra #4" before they get a sniff of a lead role. Not Cara. She’s got this weirdly magnetic intensity that makes it impossible to look at anyone else when she’s on screen.
The Breakthrough: From the Stage to Empire of Dirt
Before she was staring down Martian warships, Gee was a theater nerd in Toronto. She spent years doing the stage thing, which probably explains why she can deliver a monologue like she’s trying to punch a hole through the wall.
Her big break happened in 2013 with Empire of Dirt. It’s a heavy movie. It deals with three generations of Cree women struggling with intergenerational trauma, and Cara plays Lena, a single mother trying to navigate a messy life. If you haven't seen it, you should. She earned a Canadian Screen Award nomination for it, and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) named her one of their "Rising Stars."
It was a hell of a debut. Most actors take a decade to find their "voice," but Cara seemed to have arrived fully formed.
Why Camina Drummer Changed Everything
Let’s be real: most people searching for Cara Gee movies and tv shows are here because of The Expanse.
The funny thing? Drummer wasn’t even supposed to be that big of a deal. In the books, she’s a background character who shows up occasionally. But the showrunners saw what Cara was doing and basically went, "Okay, we need to give this woman everything." They merged several book characters into her version of Drummer.
She became the heart of the Belter resistance. Between the heavy accent (which she apparently perfected by listening to Jared Harris on a loop) and the physical toll of filming "gravity-defying" scenes while actually pregnant in real life, the performance is legendary. She’s not just "tough." She’s vulnerable, grieving, and incredibly strategic.
A Quick Look at Her Biggest TV Hits:
- The Expanse (2017–2022): The undisputed GOAT of her career so far.
- Strange Empire (2014–2015): A "Western" that’s actually gritty and doesn't romanticize the frontier. She plays Kat Loving, a woman who is just... done with everyone's nonsense.
- Sweet Tooth (2024): She joined the final season as Siana, a leader at an arctic research station. It was a nice change of pace to see her in a snowy post-apocalypse instead of a vacuum.
- Inhuman Condition (2016): A web series where she plays a supernatural being in therapy. It sounds weird, and it is, but she's great in it.
The Big Screen and Beyond
Cara Gee isn't just a TV star. She’s been popping up in some pretty major films lately, too. In 2020, she starred alongside Harrison Ford in The Call of the Wild. She played Françoise, one of the sled dog mushers. Seeing an Indigenous actress in a major Disney-adjacent production that wasn't a stereotype was a huge deal.
Then there’s Levels (2024), a sci-fi thriller where she plays Ash. It’s a mind-bending movie that asks a lot of its audience, which is exactly the kind of project Cara seems to gravitate toward. She doesn't really do "easy" roles. She does "complicated."
She also voiced Drummer again for The Expanse: A Telltale Series in 2023. If you’re a gamer, it’s worth a play just to hear her delivery of those Belter lines again. It’s like she never left the character.
Why Her Career Actually Matters
It’s easy to just list credits, but there’s a bigger picture here. Cara Gee is one of the most prominent Indigenous women in Hollywood right now. Forbes actually pointed that out, and they aren't wrong.
She’s very vocal about representation and the types of stories that get told about Indigenous people. She’s not just taking any role; she’s taking roles that have meat on the bones. Whether it’s playing a code talker in Bones of Crows or a futuristic space pirate, she brings a specific kind of dignity to the work that you don't see every day.
Honestly, she’s sort of a unicorn. She can do the "bubbly, nice person" in real-life interviews (check her out on YouTube—she’s surprisingly chipper) and then turn into a cold-blooded tactical genius the second the camera rolls.
What to Watch Next
If you’re done with The Expanse and need a fix, go find Strange Empire. It’s on Tubi (usually for free), and it’s the closest thing to the "Drummer Energy" you're going to get. It’s dark, it’s muddy, and she’s fantastic in it.
After that, check out Empire of Dirt. It shows the raw talent she started with before all the big-budget CGI stuff came along.
If you want to stay up to date with her latest moves, keep an eye on her indie projects. She seems to love the Canadian film scene and frequently returns to smaller, character-driven stories even though she could easily be doing big-budget Marvel stuff.
Actionable Insight: If you're a fan of her work in The Expanse, don't skip the Telltale game. It’s canon, it’s a prequel, and it gives a ton of backstory to why Drummer is the way she is. Also, sign up for a tracker like JustWatch to see when her 2024 film Levels hits your local streaming services—it's her most "pure" sci-fi lead role since the Roci stopped flying.