Ivana Miličević spent fifteen years being glimpsed in other people's films before Banshee gave her two women to play at once. She turned out to be an actor of stillness in a show built on noise, and it is the one place to see what she can do.
Fi1m perspective
The best thing Ivana Miličević does in Banshee happens in a supermarket. Carrie Hopewell, married, a mother, catches sight of something across an aisle and her face goes flat. Nothing moves. That stillness is the performance: a woman whose whole life depends on nobody from her past turning up, and who has practised for years not reacting when it might. The show around her is pulp, and we said so at the time. She plays it as if it were not.
It took her a long time to get there. She has been working since the mid-1990s, in small film parts and television guest spots, Jerry Maguire (1996) and Enemy of the State (1998) among them, and in a run of Eastern European and Russian-accented characters of the kind American television used to hand to any actor born east of Vienna. There were better-placed supporting roles, Vanilla Sky (2001), Love Actually (2003), Valenka in Casino Royale (2006), and a regular part as Missy in The Mind of the Married Man (2001–02), but the pattern held: attractive, accented, briefly seen. Three films with Cameron Crowe did not change it.
Banshee (2013–2016) did. Jonathan Tropper's series gave her the jewel thief Anastasia and the suburban cover she built for herself, and four seasons to let the join show. She fights, and the fights are among the best staged on television, but what she is good at is the stretch on either side of one: the decision to lie again, the cost landing on her daughter. She has said she needed "to live more life, to have more heartbreak, more family drama and sickness" before she could play the part, and it looks that way. We remember that supermarket stare more clearly than most of the gunfire, because it is the one moment the show trusts a face to do the work, and hers does it. Antony Starr carries the series and we stand by that; Miličević is the reason his Hood has anything to lose. The scripts kept inventing reasons for the next fight, and by the later seasons the plotting was working harder than the cast, but she was never the problem.
Since then it has been mostly television: Charmaine Diyoza in The 100 (2018–2020), an antagonist who becomes an ally, and the voice of Striga in Castlevania (2020–21). We have not reviewed either and will not pretend to. What we can say is that Banshee is the one time the industry put her in the middle of the frame and left her there, and she did not waste it. Start there. If the rest of the career catches up, we will say so.
Biography
Ivana Miličević is an American actress and model. Born in Sarajevo in 1974 to Bosnian Croat parents, she emigrated to the United States at the age of five and was raised in Michigan. After graduating high school she moved to Los Angeles in 1992 to pursue acting, having worked as a model while at school.
She made her film debut in Jerry Maguire (1996) and appeared in supporting roles in films including Enemy of the State (1998), Vanilla Sky (2001), Love Actually (2003) and Just Like Heaven (2005). Miličević is known for playing Valenka in the James Bond film Casino Royale (2006) and for starring as Carrie Hopewell in the series Banshee (2013–2016) and Charmaine Diyoza in The 100 (2018–2020). She has also made numerous guest appearances on television series such as Seinfeld, Friends, House and Gotham.
