Julia Stiles - Wikipedia

Film and television

After finding an agent, Stiles began auditioning for television in 1993 and films in 1996.[6] She made her acting debut in 1993 on the mystery show Ghostwriter as Erica Dansby.[7]

Stiles's first film role was in I Love You, I Love You Not (1996), with Claire Danes and Jude Law.[8] She also had small roles as Harrison Ford's character's daughter in Alan J. Pakula's The Devil's Own (1997) and in M. Night Shyamalan's Wide Awake (1998). Her first lead was in Wicked (1998), in which she played a teenage girl who might have murdered her mother so she could have her father all to herself. Critic Joe Baltake wrote she was "the darling of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival."[9] She next starred in the TV miniseries The '60s in 1999.[9]

Stiles was cast at the age of 17 for the role of Kat Stratford,[6] opposite Heath Ledger in Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew set in high school. She won an MTV Movie Award for Breakthrough Female Performance for the role. The Chicago Film Critics Association voted her as the most promising new actress of 1999.[10] Her next starring role was in Down to You (2000), which was panned by critics, but earned both her and her co-star Freddie Prinze, Jr. a Teen Choice Award nomination for their on-screen chemistry. She subsequently appeared in two more Shakespearean adaptations. The first was as Ophelia in Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), with Ethan Hawke in the lead. The second was in the Desdemona role, opposite Mekhi Phifer, in Tim Blake Nelson's O (2001), a version of Othello set at a boarding school. Neither film was a great success; O was subject to many delays and a change of distributors, and Hamlet was an art house film shot on a minimal budget.

Stiles's next commercial success was in Save the Last Dance (2001) as an aspiring ballerina forced to leave her small town in downstate Illinois to live with her struggling musician father in Chicago after her mother dies in a car accident. At her new, nearly all-black school, she falls in love with the character played by Sean Patrick Thomas who teaches her hip-hop dancing to help get her into the Juilliard School. The role won her two more MTV awards for Best Kiss and Best Female Performance and a Teen Choice Award for best fight scene for her battle with Bianca Lawson. Rolling Stone magazine named her "the coolest co-ed" and put her on the cover of its April 12, 2001, issue.[11] She told Rolling Stone that she performed all her own dancing in the film, except for some closeups of the feet.[11]

In David Mamet's State and Main (2000), about a film shooting on location in a small town in Vermont, Stiles played a teenage girl who seduces a film actor (Alec Baldwin) with a weakness for teen girls. Stiles also appeared opposite Stockard Channing in the dark art house film The Business of Strangers (2001) as a conniving, amoral secretary who exacts revenge on her boss. Channing was impressed by her co-star: "In addition to her talent, she has a quality that is almost feral, something that can make people uneasy. She has an effect on people."[12] Stiles later described the Bourne franchise as very important for her career, stating that it "reinvented the action genre, especially for female characters".[6] Her small role as Treadstone operative Nicolette "Nicky" Parsons in The Bourne Identity (2002) grew in The Bourne Supremacy (2004), then greatly expanded in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007).

Between the Bourne films, she appeared in Mona Lisa Smile (2003) as Joan, a student at Wellesley College in 1953, whose art professor (Julia Roberts) encourages her to pursue a career in law rather than become a wife and mother. Critic Stephen Holden called her one of cinema's "brightest young stars",[13] but the film met with generally unfavorable reviews. Stiles played a Wisconsin college student who is swept off her feet by a Danish prince, played by Luke Mably, in The Prince and Me (2004), directed by Martha Coolidge. Stiles told an interviewer that she was very similar to her character Paige Morgan. Critic Scott Foundas said she was "irrepressibly engaging" and the film was a "strange career choice for Stiles".[14] This echoed criticism in reviews of A Guy Thing (2003), a romantic comedy with Jason Lee and Selma Blair. Critic Dennis Harvey wrote that Stiles was "wasted",[15] and Holden called her "a serious actress from whom comedy does not seem to flow naturally".[16] In 2006, Stiles starred opposite her Hamlet co-star Liev Schreiber in The Omen, a remake of the 1976 horror film.[17] She returned to the Bourne series with a much larger role in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), her highest-grossing film to date.

Stiles acted in Between Us (2012) with Taye Diggs, David Harbour, and Melissa George. Between Us is the screen adaptation of the off-Broadway play of the same name by Joe Hortua.[18] Stiles starred alongside David Cross and America Ferrera in the dark comedy It's a Disaster.[19] The film premiered at the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival and was picked up by Oscilloscope Laboratories and received a limited release the next year. Stiles had a small but pivotal role as a reporter in the 2013 British-American film Closed Circuit. Stiles starred in the indie supernatural thriller Out of the Dark (2014) alongside Scott Speedman and Stephen Rea.[20]

In 2015, Stiles signed on to reprise her role as Nicky Parsons in Jason Bourne, the fifth installment of the Bourne franchise.[21] She also featured as Courtney, the wayward mother of Sophie Nélisse, in The Great Gilly Hopkins (2016).[22] In 2019, Stiles appeared in the movie Hustlers as the journalist, Elizabeth. The film was a box office success.[23]

Stage

While Stiles performed in a school play in fourth grade, Bob McGrath of Ridge Theater in Manhattan, a friend of her parents, needed an actor for a nonspeaking role.[6] Stiles's first theatrical roles were in works by author/composer John Moran at Ridge Theater from 1993 to 1998. In the summer of 2002, she performed on stage in Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues,[24] and appeared as Viola, the lead role in Shakespeare in the Park's production of Twelfth Night with Jimmy Smits.[25]

In 2004, she made her West End stage debut opposite Aaron Eckhart in a revival of David Mamet's play Oleanna at the Garrick Theatre.[26][27] She reprised the role of Carol in a 2009 production of Oleanna, directed by Doug Hughes and co-starring Bill Pullman at the Mark Taper Forum.[28] The production moved to Broadway's John Golden Theatre.[29]

Stiles was to play Jeannie in a production of Neil LaBute's Fat Pig directed by the playwright beginning in spring 2011,[30] but the show was postponed indefinitely.[31]

Other work

Stiles appeared in the video for Cyndi Lauper's single "Sally's Pigeons" in 1993.[32] In 2001, she hosted Saturday Night Live and returned to parody as then-President George W. Bush's daughter Jenna Bush in a skit that poked fun at the two first daughters for being arrested for underage drinking. MTV profiled her in its Diary series in 2003,[33] and she was Punk'd by Ashton Kutcher at a Washington, D.C., museum in 2004.[34]

In 2010, Stiles played a major role in 10 episodes of the Showtime series Dexter[35][36][37][38] For this role, she received a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film,[39] as well as a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.

In 2012, the web series Blue starred Stiles as a single mother with a 13-year-old son. She works at an office and also as a call girl to make ends meet on an otherwise meager income fighting to protect her son from the collision between her complicated past and tenuous present.[40] For her work on Blue, Stiles won two IAWTV Awards, in 2013 and 2014.[41] The actress during the recordings shared set with artists like Michelle Forbes, JC Gonzalez, and Uriah Shelton.

Stiles played Maisy-May in the Canadian Amazon Prime series The Lake. Maisy-May is the "picture-perfect" stepdaughter/stepsister who was given the family cottage by her stepfather, to the dismay of her stepbrother Justin.[42][43] Season 1 premiered in summer 2022.[43]

Film director

Stiles made her writing and directorial debut with Elle magazine's short Raving starring Zooey Deschanel.[44] It premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.[45]

Stiles' first feature film as a director, Wish You Were Here, was released in January 2025.[46]