Lucy Danziger

Lucy is Nucky Thompson's kept mistress in Atlantic City, installed in a comfortable apartment and dressed in whatever finery he provides. She's sharp-tongued, restless, and openly transactional about her arrangement, treating glamour and boredom as two sides of the same coin while she waits to see what more she can get out of the life she's landed in.

The show could easily have let her stay decorative, but Paz de la Huerta plays Lucy's brittleness as a kind of honesty — she says the venal, self-interested thing other characters only think. That bluntness, delivered with unsettling flatness, makes her a small jolt of candor in a world built on performance and pretense.