Bojana Novaković

From Belgrade to Sydney with No Return Ticket

Bojana Novaković arrived in Australia at age seven in 1988. She did not speak English, but she brought with her the intensity of a Yugoslavia that was beginning to crumble. She graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in 2002, and by then she already knew that acting was not a game of mirrors but a matter of physical endurance.

Her first major role was in the series Wildside in 1997, when she was still a teenager.

And she did it without asking for permission.

During her early years in the Australian industry, she avoided stereotyped immigrant roles. She worked in theater and independent film because she wanted characters who were in control of their own chaos. In 2003, she won an Australian Film Institute award for her role in the miniseries Marking Time, and that gave her the freedom she needed to start choosing scripts outside her comfort zone.

Hollywood's Hard Reality

In 2009 Sam Raimi called her for Drag Me to Hell, and a year later she shared the screen with Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness. In that film she played Gibson's daughter, and her death in the first few minutes drives the whole plot. It was a 80 million dollar shoot that put her on the radar of the major Los Angeles studios.

But Novaković never felt comfortable with the label of rising star.

She preferred to alternate big-budget productions with personal projects in Australia. In 2014 she starred in the dramedy The Little Death, where she explored dark humor and sexual paraphilias with a naturalness that disarmed critics. So she began jumping between continents with a suitcase and three or four underlined scripts.

In 2015 she appeared in the series Shameless, and shortly after she led the cast of Instinct alongside Alan Cumming.

The Activist Who Stopped a Multinational

Away from the spotlight, her life has little to do with red carpets. Since 2021, she has been one of the most outspoken voices against lithium mining in her native Serbia. She led protests against the company Rio Tinto and used her influence to halt extractive projects that threatened the ecosystem of the Jadar Valley.

That political side did not slow her pace of work in fiction.

In 2021 she starred in the series Love Me, playing Clara, a woman coping with grief and love after her mother's death. The production ran until 2023 and allowed her to shoot in Melbourne with a local crew. In 2024 she joined the cast of Chicago P.D. to bring detective Josephine Petrovic to life.

Her contract for the eleventh season of the police drama included a strict confidentiality clause about her character's storyline. Novaković still keeps her residence between Sydney and the United States while she runs her own independent production company. In 2024, the series Chicago P.D. confirmed it would continue for a twelfth season with her in the main cast.