Stana Katic

Biography: A multilingual, Canada-born up-and-comer, this athletic beauty is skilled at playing mysterious, exotically named and accented characters. In the '00s, Katic worked steadily in a slew of TV guest spots, putting in brief appearances on action series such as Alias and 24 before landing the role of vengeful, motorcycle-riding warrior Hana Gielman on Heroes. Blessed/cursed as a human transmitter and receiver capable of intercepting all kinds of electronic signals, Katic's imposing alter ego was also a whiz with firearms. But she gained greater recognition beginning in 2009, as Kate Beckett in the ABC series Castle, a Moonlighting-esque drama in which Katic's straightlaced homicide detective trades barbs and one-liners with Nathan Fillion's mystery novelist Richard Castle.