Margaret Schroeder Thompson

Margaret Schroeder is an Irish immigrant scraping by in Atlantic City, married to a brutal, drunken husband and pregnant with another child she can barely feed. She comes to Nucky Thompson's office seeking charitable relief, composed and careful in her request, sizing up the powerful man across the desk with more shrewdness than her circumstances would suggest.

Kelly Macdonald plays her with a stillness that reads as survival instinct rather than passivity — every polite word calculated against real danger at home. The writing lets her arrive poor and desperate without ever making her pitiable; she negotiates. That quiet, watchful intelligence is what makes her worth following long before the plot gives her more room to use it.