A New Year, a new Harlan Coben adaptation to binge on Netflix. Hooray!
And this one looks to be as gripping as ever: our hero is Kat Donovan, played by Rosalind Eleazar. She celebrated her engagement to Josh Buchanan 11 years ago, before he mysteriously vanished from her life. Now it looks like he’s back – as he pops up on her dating app. The only question is, why?
And as Kat digs deeper, it looks like some unresolved trauma from her past – namely, the death of her father, the celebrated police officer Clint Donovan, who was killed years ago – might have to face the light of day, too.
"When we first meet Kat, people might think of her as quite a strong person, but we see that getting chipped away,” Eleazar has told What to Watch. “She has a lot of anger and unanswered questions.”
But who is Rosalind Eleazar?
Eleazar is a British actor. Born in the UK to a Ghanaian father and British mother, her parents split up when she was young and she was raised in London by her mother. At 13, she won a scholarship to Gordonstoun – the school Prince Charles also attended in his youth.
“I know everyone thinks, ‘Oh God, boarding school is spartan,’” she told the Times, but she says she enjoyed it, going onto study Chinese and Spanish at Nottingham University so she could work at the UN. “I wanted to do something that, you know, might actually have helped,” she added. “Then I was, like, f*** it.”
After a spell working in Ghana for her half-brother’s production company, and a shipping company (as well as being engaged to a “very hot” Greek man, as per The Times), she pivoted to acting, graduating from LAMDA at the age of 27, in 2015.
“I was a bit nervous about acting, although I always wanted to do it,” she told the A Rabbit’s Foot website. “I did a bit of TV production for a while, and then made this big decision to come back to London and follow what I really wanted… it felt like such a relief, finally, doing what I dream about.”
She picked up work on stage, appearing in The Starry Messenger at Wyndham’s Theatre (opposite Matthew Broderick, no less) and in Uncle Vanya, as Yelena, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, and The House of Bernada Alba at the National.
“There’s something true about theatre,” she told A Rabbit’s Foot about her stage work. “It’s alive because of the audience. You get to connect in a unique way. I love television and I love film, but plays are always different. It’s where I began and, you know, each night is unique. It has something special in every performance.”
After smaller roles in BBC show Howard’s End, Harlots and Rellik, her big break – and first film role – came in 2019 when she was cast to play Agnes in Armando Iannucci’s adaptation of The Personal History of David Copperfield.
Since then, she’s followed it up with as a turn as the disgraced spy Louisa Guy on the Apple TV+ series Slow Horses, which she’ll be reprising for the fifth season in 2025.
“What can I say… I think viewers are going to be quite shocked,” she told Fabric magazine. “I think they’re going to be quite shocked at what happens. I don’t think you expect what happens to Louisa in this series…”
Missing You is streaming on Netflix from New Year’s Day
