Julianna Guill
Julianna Guill is an actor, born 1987.
For roughly a decade the parts were decorative, and the billing said so out loud. Julianna Guill is Another Girl in Fired Up!, Katy in Road Trip: Beer Pong, Madison in Crazy, Stupid, Love. and Bree in the 2009 Friday the 13th remake. Born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1987, she spent those years being cast for a look rather than for anything she could do with a scene.
Television is where it started to turn. She was Christie DeWitt on the college comedy Glory Daze, Becca Riley on Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce, and Jessie Nevin across five years of The Resident from 2018. Recurring work is a strange apprenticeship: you get four scenes a season and have to build a person out of them, and she got noticeably better at it.
The lead came in 2021, with Joe Pickett. As Marybeth Pickett, opposite the title character in a neo western crime series, she finally had a role written as a partner rather than an ornament, with her own competence, her own judgement and her own share of the plot. It is the performance to judge her on. Elsewhere the record fills in with genre and independent work: The Apparition, Altitude, Treehouse, Anya in Alex of Venice, Alice on the television Rush Hour, and a brief turn as Butterfly McMillan in Psych: The Movie.
Movies (10)
TV (6)
Where to start with Julianna Guill
Skip the first decade and go straight to Joe Pickett. Marybeth is the role that lets her be smart on camera, and once you have seen it the earlier casting looks like a decade of wasted time.
Work backwards from there. The Resident gives her a recurring arc with real weight in a medical show that otherwise runs hot. Alex of Venice is the small independent film in this list and the one where she is asked to underplay.
The comedies are the honest fun. Crazy, Stupid, Love. is a very good studio film in which she has a couple of minutes and lands them. Fired Up! and Road Trip: Beer Pong are period pieces from a genre that no longer gets made.
Horror completists will want Friday the 13th, a remake with more energy than sense, and The Apparition, which has neither.