Why Vanessa From The Five Nights At Freddy's Movie Looks So Familiar

Based on the popular video game series of the same name, "Five Nights at Freddy's" presents an interesting and terrifying thought: what if the animatronic mascots you see at a themed restaurant came alive at night? To make that even worse, what if they were all murderers? 

Josh Hutcherson's main character, Mike Schmidt, is the security guard who finds himself in the line of fire overnight at the fictional children's restaurant Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. When he needs help, he turns to Vanessa, a police officer played by Elizabeth Lail. So who exactly is Lail, and where have you seen her before?

The 31-year-old actress has shown up in a ton of buzzy projects, from popular network dramas to runaway Netflix hits to short-lived reboots. Whether you haven't caught "Five Nights at Freddy's" yet or you just watched it and can't quite place Vanessa, here's where you've seen Elizabeth Lail before.

Early in her career, Elizabeth Lail booked spots on popular shows like "Once Upon a Time" — where she plays the live-action version of Anna from Disney's modern animated classic "Frozen" — and the Freeform horror series "Dead of Summer." However, "The Blacklist" turned out to be Lail's huge break. In the Season 4 episode "Natalie Luca," Lail plays the title character, who ends up providing clues to a mystery that runs for the rest of the season.

After one of Raymond "Red" Reddington's (James Spader) accountants mysteriously turns up dead, he and Liz Keen (Megan Boone) try to figure out what happened and realize the accountant died of a highly deadly infectious disease spread by a woman named Natalie Luca. Once they track Natalie down, they discover that she works for one of the season's major antagonists, Isabella Stone (Melora Hardin), and that Natalie is immune to this seriously dangerous disease. Thanks to this, she's been killing rich people so that she can use her blood to do expensive research that could help others become immune, as well. 

Natalie doesn't exactly get a happy ending — and Lail only plays her for one episode — but it's a huge event in Season 4 of "The Blacklist."

After "The Blacklist" and a one-episode turn on "The Good Fight," Elizabeth Lail booked her biggest role yet with "You," a series that started out on Lifetime before migrating entirely to Netflix. Lail kicks off the show by playing Guinevere Beck, who goes by her last name (for understandable reasons) and who becomes the object of Joe Goldberg's (Penn Badgley) original obsession. Throughout the show, Joe makes a habit of choosing women to stalk and idealize, killing anyone who gets in the way of their relationship. When Beck finds mementos from people he's killed, including her ex-boyfriend and best friend, Joe locks her up in his secret basement cage. Things don't end well from there.

Even though Joe kills Beck at the end of Season 1 — and even posthumously publishes her memoirs just to frame her therapist — Lail returns briefly in later seasons. In Season 2, Joe hallucinates different visions of Beck while he's pursuing Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti). Season 3 also has a few flashbacks to Beck and Joe's relationship, but in Season 4, Lail returns for a bigger guest role when Joe sees Beck, Love, and other ghosts as they try to convince him to end his cruel life.

After the success of the original series on the CW, Max tried to recapture lightning in a bottle by rebooting "Gossip Girl" in 2021 — and it just didn't take. The "Gossip Girl" reboot ended up getting canceled after just two seasons. As for Lail, she briefly played a supporting role as Lola Morgan in the show's debut season.

Lola — not to be confused with the original show's Lola, a wealthy heiress hiding from her family — shows up for a little while in Season 1 as the former fiancée to music executive Davis Calloway ("The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" star Luke Kirby). You don't know that at first, though; when Lola first appears, she bonds with It girl Julien Calloway (Jordan Alexander) in a bar bathroom over boy troubles, and both Julien and the audience find out later that Lola is talking about Julien's dad, Davis. Apparently, Davis and Lola have been carrying on a secret relationship, and this makes Julien resentful and angry, so she schemes against the two of them.

Small role aside, casting Lail here is a clever move because of her role on "You." Penn Badgley is, of course, an original "Gossip Girl" cast member known for playing Dan Humphrey (who actually turned out to be the titular gossiping girl). Lola is a small role, but it feels like a cool Easter egg for fans of both shows.

In 2022, after "You" really put Elizabeth Lail on the map, she booked a major film role opposite screen legend Diane Keaton in the time-travel comedy "Mack & Rita." Lail plays the younger version of Mackenzie "Mack" Martin, who's unsure about going to a bachelorette weekend in Palm Springs to support her best friend, Carla (Taylour Paige). When she misses the party, she stumbles across a tent that transforms her physically, turning into an older version of herself (Keaton). By becoming a more mature version of herself, Mack makes a lot of self-discoveries, and she finds joy in life, letting her anxiety fall by the wayside.

Lail and Keaton star alongside a pretty great cast that includes Dustin Milligan ("Schitt's Creek"), Simon Rex ("Red Rocket"), comedian Nicole Byer, and Patti Harrison ("I Think You Should Leave." The movie didn't make a huge splash with critics, but at the very least, it gave Lail a starring vehicle and a chance to learn from a veteran like Keaton.