Kristen Hager
Kristen Hager is an actor, born 1983.
Two loud American films, released a year apart, opened the door: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem in 2007 and Wanted in 2008. Neither asked much of Kristen Hager beyond being convincing while frightened, which is a real skill and a limiting one. She was born in Red Lake, Ontario, and has worked on both sides of the Canadian border ever since.
The interesting work started when smaller films noticed she could carry unease without playing it. She appeared in Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan film I'm Not There, and played Leslie Van Houten in the independent drama Leslie, My Name Is Evil, a part that could easily have tipped into caricature and does not. Her longest run came on the supernatural series Being Human, where she played Nora Sergeant from 2011 to 2014 and got the thing television gives that films rarely do: time enough for a character to change her mind about herself.
Since then she has mostly worked in the middle tier of American series and Canadian features, which suits her. She is Mae Barber in Condor, Laura in WHAT / IF, Rebecca in the Toronto-shot Clara, Veronica in the 2015 drama Life, and Valerie Thompson in Suits LA. There is no reinvention narrative in this filmography and no obvious peak yet, just a working actor who keeps getting hired because she makes ordinary reaction shots believable.
Movies (9)
TV (5)
Where to start with Kristen Hager
Nothing else here gives her a full arc, so Being Human comes first. Nora starts as the girlfriend character, the role usually written to worry in doorways, and Hager plays her steadily into someone with her own agenda and her own problem to solve.
For film, Clara is the best-made thing here, a quiet Canadian science fiction romance that trusts its actors to be still. I'm Not There is a smaller assignment inside a much stranger film, and worth it for the company she is keeping.
The genre credits are honest fun rather than art: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem is the crude one, Wanted the glossy one, and Life the prestige one that never quite ignites. If you want her current register, Condor and Suits LA are the recent, professional, unshowy work.