Johanna Day
Johanna Day is an actor.
Day is a stage actor first, and the screen credits here amount to the side job. Her reputation was built in New York theatre: two Tony nominations, one for Proof in 2000 and one for the 2016 production of Sweat, alongside an Obie, a Helen Hayes Award and a long list of other nominations.
The film and television work follows the pattern that stage actors' screen work usually does. She is the saleswoman in Unbreakable, Eunice Showalter in The Knick, Ellen Hill in Madam Secretary, a principal in The Great Gilly Hopkins, Beth Tickler in True Story, Judy in Save Yourselves. These are small parts, and the useful thing about a stage actor in a small part is that they arrive already knowing what the scene is for.
Six screen credits makes a thin page for someone with that theatre record. The honest summary is that most of the work worth seeing happened in rooms where nobody was filming.
Movies (4)
TV (2)
Where to start with Johanna Day
The Knick is the best-made thing on this list and the best use of her, a period hospital drama in which even a small role has to carry a whole social position. Start there.
Save Yourselves! is the lightest thing here and a good change of register, while Unbreakable is the most famous title she appears in even though the role is brief. After that, Madam Secretary and True Story cover the procedural and the prestige-adjacent respectively, and The Great Gilly Hopkins is a children's adaptation with her as a principal. None of it substitutes for seeing her on a stage, which remains the actual recommendation.