Bojana Novaković
Bojana Novaković is an actor, born 1981.
Bojana Novakovic was born in Belgrade in 1981 and moved to Australia as a child, and that second country shaped the first decade of her career. Australian television took her early: she was working in Blackrock, Wildside and Murder Call while still a teenager.
Australia kept her longer than it usually keeps anyone. Satisfaction, Rake and the film Burning Man are the run that matters there, and they show what she is genuinely good at, which is playing women considerably less composed than the scene is asking them to be. She does not smooth things over. Where a line could be delivered as poised, she picks the version that admits the panic underneath.
Hollywood used her mainly in horror, and used her well. Drag Me to Hell, Devil and The Hallow all put her inside pressure cookers, and she is one of the few performers in that mode who can be terrified without becoming small. American network television then handed her Lizzie Needham, the detective in the procedural Instinct, a straight lead that wanted competence more than nerve.
Her recent work has swung back toward character parts: Dody Teachman in I, Tonya, a lead in the Australian series Love Me, another horror lead in Bloat.
Movies (14)
TV (6)
Where to start with Bojana Novaković
The efficient introduction is Drag Me to Hell, where she has a small part and spends every second of it doing something more interesting than screaming. From there, The Little Death is the one to argue about: a sex comedy that keeps turning uncomfortable, and she carries its best stretch.
For the Australian side, Burning Man is the serious pick and Rake the enjoyable one. Instinct is the mainstream lead, competent and a little airless, worth an episode if you want to see her hold a network procedural together.
If you like your horror stripped down, The Hallow and Bloat are both small films that hand her the entire weight. I, Tonya is the reminder that she can be the best thing in three scenes of a film about somebody else.