Julie Khaner
Julie Khaner is an actor, born 1957.
Khaner came up in Canadian production during the years when Toronto was shooting everything: series drama for the CBC, American features looking for a cheaper crew, and the occasional horror picture made down the road. Her earliest credit here is a bit part in the 1980 disaster film Virus. Three years later David Cronenberg cast her as Bridey in Videodrome, and that is the credit that travels.
Home ground was Canadian television, where she spent long runs playing the credible professional. She was Alana Newman Robinovitch on Street Legal from 1987, a law-office part that asks an actor to make procedure sound like character, and Sidney Dernhoff on Ken Finkleman's The Newsroom, a comedy that ran on people being politely awful to one another. The 1995 version of Jake and the Kid gave her Emily Henchpaw. Wikipedia also lists her as Gen in Deepwater Black.
Since then the work has been supporting and steady, mostly in film: Bimsy in Atom Egoyan's Chloe, Mrs. Dawkins in the small-town crime picture Shimmer Lake, a judge on The Firm, a detective in the Mary Kay Letourneau television movie, a rabbi in Lullaby, voice work in Ballerina. It is a career built on being the most believable adult in the frame, which is a harder job than it sounds and almost never the one that gets noticed.
Movies (7)
TV (6)
Where to start with Julie Khaner
Videodrome first, though not for her screen time. Cronenberg surrounds a man losing his grip with people who behave normally, and Khaner's steadiness is part of what makes the slide measurable.
The real body of work is Canadian television. Street Legal is the long-form version of what she does, years of a professional written as a person rather than a function, and The Newsroom is the funnier counterweight, a workplace satire with real contempt for its own industry. Jake and The Kid is the gentle prairie option.
For recent and compact work, try Shimmer Lake, a crime story that unfolds in reverse and forces her to play a scene out of sequence, and Chloe, where she is a small part of a very controlled Egoyan chamber piece.