Angeliki Papoulia
Papoulia is a Greek actress and a theatre director, and the theatre half matters, because what she is known for on screen is a kind of controlled flatness that stage actors are usually trained out of. She belongs to the group of performers who made Greek cinema of the late 2000s feel like nothing else: deadpan delivery, unbearable stillness, violence arriving without a change of tone.
She played the Older Daughter in Dogtooth in 2009, a part that requires her to be a child and a grown woman at the same moment, and she was awarded the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Actress for it. She was the Nurse in Alps in 2011 and the Heartless Woman in The Lobster in 2015, three films for Yorgos Lanthimos in which she is always the character who takes the rules of the world most seriously, which is exactly what makes her frightening in them.
She has also worked twice with Syllas Tzoumerkas, on A Blast and The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea, neither of which is among the credits listed here.
The work since has widened out. The horror film Amulet in 2020, a voice role in the hand-drawn Cryptozoo, and a crowded 2025 across I Was a Stranger, To a Land Unknown, The Megalomaniacs and the series Bookish.
Movies (8)
TV (1)
Where to start with Angeliki Papoulia
Dogtooth is the first one and the necessary one, though it is a genuinely hard watch and you should know that going in. Her Older Daughter is the engine of the film: a woman playing a girl who has never been permitted to be either, and she does it without a single soft moment.
Alps next, the same register applied to grief, and the more underrated film of the two. Then The Lobster, where she is credited as the Heartless Woman and earns the name almost immediately.
Outside that run, Amulet is the best showcase of her in English, a slow horror film content to let her stay unreadable, and Cryptozoo is a complete swerve into hand-drawn animation with her in a voice part. To a Land Unknown and the series Bookish are where the recent work sits.