Claire Coffee

United States 🎬 Actresses

Claire Coffee spent seven seasons as Adalind Schade on Grimm, playing the show's most compellingly written villain-turned-antihero with enough ambiguity and genuine menace that audiences never quite knew whether to root for her or against her — which is the exact right position for that character to occupy. The San Francisco-born actress came to the role with a substantial television background, and Grimm gave her the kind of long-form character arc that shows what happens when you put a real actor in a recurring role and then actually write to her strengths. Adalind's journey from irredeemable villain to complicated ally is one of procedural television's more interesting character evolutions, and it works entirely because of Coffee's ability to make the contradictions believable. With 85 images in her library, she's built an audience from the Grimm fanbase that clearly hasn't moved on — testimony to how much that character mattered.