Imogen Poots has long inhabited roles of fragility, mystery, and emotional intensity. In All of You, she offers one of her most vulnerable and nuanced performances yet, playing Laura, a woman who signs up for a futuristic “soulmate” experiment and whose life trajectory becomes tangled with unspoken love, regret, and possibility. She infuses Laura with a quiet yearning—soft, anchored, restless—allowing the film’s speculative conceit to rest on deeply human stakes.
Born on June 3, 1989, in Hammersmith, London, Poots is the daughter of a television producer from Belfast and a journalist and volunteer from Brighton. She was privately educated in West London and, despite an early ambition to become a veterinary surgeon, found her way instead to performance. She spent Saturdays attending an improvisation workshop and gradually drifted into acting, deferring her academic plans to pursue what became a lifelong vocation.
Poots made her on-screen debut in the early 2000s with small parts, and her breakthrough came in 2007 when she played Tammy in 28 Weeks Later. In the years since she’s built a career around her ability to oscillate seamlessly between genres: she’s been in horror (Fright Night), thriller (Green Room), drama (The Father), romance (That Awkward Moment), and science fiction (Vivarium). She gravitates toward projects that demand emotional rigor, often leaning into ambiguity rather than tidy narrative resolutions.
In All of You, Laura is curious, open, almost reckless in her willingness to test the edges of love. When she takes the compatibility experiment offered by the company Soul Connex, she is matched not with Simon—played by Brett Goldstein—but with another man named Lukas. Laura proceeds to marry Lukas and build a life, all the while maintaining a profound connection with Simon. Poots plays these shifting emotional alliances with a subtle ferocity: you sense all that is left unspoken in her glances, half-smiles, and silences. Over the film’s years-spanning arc, Laura’s heart is pulled in different directions, and Poots resists making her a victim or villain. Instead she renders her a deeply empathetic figure—someone trying to follow her desires while bearing the weight of consequences.
Her chemistry with Goldstein crackles, and the sense that they’ve known each other forever is intentional: their closeness, accumulated over time, is credible, even when their relationship spirals into betrayal and longing. In interviews she has expressed skepticism about the idea of a test that quantifies love, preferring the mess, mystery, and magic of unpredictability. That ambivalence gives her portrayal an emotional realism: Laura doesn’t feel like a vessel for grand ideas but like a person caught in them.
Beyond All of You, Poots’s creative trajectory mirrors her inclination toward complexity. She has never been a blockbuster star in the traditional sense; instead she seems drawn to directors and projects willing to challenge her, whether through tone, structure, or rawness. She’s willing to let her characters stay in the tension between what they want and what they believe they deserve. There is a defiant humility to her work: she does not seek to dominate every scene but to become part of the emotional architecture, letting her co-stars and material breathe around her.
In All of You, Poots offers a vision of love not as destination but as terrain to be traveled, reexamined, and sometimes mourned. Her Laura is not a romantic ideal but a person with competing loyalties—to family, to friendship, to the past, and to longing. By the film’s end, even when closure eludes her, there’s a sense that Laura has lived fully, loved deeply, and been changed forever. In that ambiguity lies Poots’s strength: she does not resolve her characters; she lets them remain alive to possibility.
