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It’s always so exciting when someone makes a big splash in a medium formerly unknown to them. Jessica Chastain’s blockbuster 2011 when she went from complete unknown to the breakthrough star of films like The Tree of Life, The Help, and Take Shelter, nabbing an Oscar nomination and an A-list career from there. This fall, if you’re looking to get in on the ground floor with a breakthrough actress about to take the movies by storm, look no further than Cynthia Erivo, currently standing toe-to-toe with Viola Davis in the excellent crime thriller Widows. Erivo plays Belle, a late addition to the team of crime widows (played by Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, and Michelle Rodriguez) looking to complete their husbands’ last job to get them out of danger, and from the second she joins up, there’s an electricity to her presence. She’s the only one whose presence seems to stand up to Davis’s own. It’s a heck of a scene.

You might be surprised to see a first-time film actress hold that kind of ground in a scene like that if you’re unfamiliar with Erivo’s work on the stage, where she’s a Tony-winning leading actress who made her bones on her native London stage before finding award-winning success in her Broadway debut as Celie in the 2015 revival of The Color Purple. The role had already previously won a Tony in its original incarnation, which might have made the bar for Erivo too high to impress anyone were she a lesser actress. She is decidedly not a lesser actress.

It’s no wonder the movies have wanted to claim her so quickly considering her tendency to spark up everything she steps into. After Widows made its festival season debut in September, Erivo appeared in Bad Times at the El Royale, which had the good sense to cast her as a singer stranded at the titular sinister motel. Coming soon, Erivo will star in films from the likes of Doug Liman (she’ll co-star with Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley in the sci-fi adaptation Chaos Walking) and John Ridley (another science fiction film, Needle in a Timestack, opposite fellow Tony-winner Leslie Odom Jr.), and in 2019, Erivo will play the title role in Kasi Lemmons’ Harriet Tubman bio-pic.

Once The Color Purple hit and the Broadway community knew what they had on their hands, Erivo was everywhere, invited to guest in or on any number of special events, lending her talents to bring that extra bit of gravitas to anything she touched. And she honestly has. Among the better YouTube rabbit holes to tumble down is the “Cynthia Erivo shows up and casually brings the house down” rabbit hole. Here she is showing up with Oscar-winning La La Land songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, belting a song from their Tony-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen. If watching live performers conduct arrangement changes on the fly while they sing is your fetish, settle the heck in:

Here she is showing up AGAIN for Pasek & Paul (hey maybe they can write a damn role for her?), pitching in for the Greatest Showman read-through that got that insane blockbuster of a circus musical greenlit in the first place. And while Hugh Jackman certainly did his part, I can’t imagine it hurt that Erivo and eventual Greatest Showman star Keala Settle decided to stage a diva-off in the middle of the big breakdown of “From Now On” (if only the cameras had captured more of it):

This duet cover of Taylor Swift’s “I Did Something Bad” with fellow Broadway star Shoshana Bean is the stuff of stoic commitment the Buckingham Palace guards can only dream of:

And finally, for the “I can’t believe this kind of stuff actually happens” file, here’s the night that Cynthia Erivo showed up at New York City piano bar Marie’s Crisis and sang “I Can Do Better Than That” from the musical The Last Five Years for the gathered patrons, whose rapt attention (and occasional helping hands) tell the whole story.

Take this YouTube rabbit hole out for a spin as often as you need to. It is the perfect pick-me-up, and it will radicalize you on the subject of breakthrough Hollywood star Cynthia Erivo.