Sandra Drzymalska, The Doll’s Izabela, Keeps Taking Back Women Written as Prizes

Sandra Drzymalska

Photo: Telemagazyn / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 24, 1993 Wejherowo, Poland
Occupation	Actress
Known for	EO, Mr. Car and the Knights Templar, Letters to Santa 2
Awards	Festival of Polish Feature Films (Gdynia)

Two Izabela Łęckas reached Polish screens within a fortnight this autumn, and the one who arrived first was Sandra Drzymalska. In Paweł Maślona’s six-part The Doll for Netflix, the most famous heroine of Polish literature stops being the cold idol that generations of schoolchildren were taught to resent. Drzymalska plays her quick-tongued and calculating, and increasingly aware that the men around her are pricing her. A fortnight later, Maciej Kawalski’s cinema version put Kamila Urzędowska in the same corset, closer to the novel and more of a prisoner of her family. One critic who set the two side by side declared the duel a draw.

The comparison is a fair summary of Drzymalska’s career. She is cast again and again as women whose lives are decided by someone else: a bride handed to the wrong brother, a circus performer who loses her animal to the people taking the circus apart, an aristocrat whose ruined father needs her to marry money. What she has built, role by role, is a way of playing those women so that the decision never quite belongs to the people making it.

She comes from Wejherowo, a town near Gdańsk on the Kashubian edge of Pomerania, where she was born on 24 July 1993 to a car mechanic and a nurse and grew up with two younger brothers. Her first stage was the school theatre at the town’s Jan III Sobieski high school, which she finished in 2012. Five years later she graduated from the acting faculty of the AST National Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków.

Television was where she started. Before she had finished her studies she was already a main character in Canal+’s crime series Belfer, and soon after she played Łucja Koszykowska in the TVP saga Stulecie Winnych. The Italian director Carlo Sironi gave her a part in Sole, which won her a special mention at the Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal, and two small Polish features, Ostatni komers and Każdy ma swoje lato, earned her an acting distinction in the microbudget competition at Gdynia.

The audience outside Poland found her through a sex app. In Netflix’s Sexify, created by Kalina Alabrudzińska and Piotr Domalewski, she played Monika Nowicka, one of three university students trying to build an app about female pleasure. The series ran for two seasons and put Drzymalska on the October 2021 cover of Vogue Polska. It also fixed an image she would spend the next years complicating.

Jerzy Skolimowski did the complicating first. In EO, his film about a grey donkey crossing modern Europe, Drzymalska is Kasandra, the circus performer whose act with the animal opens the film and whose loss sets the whole story moving. She has little screen time and almost no plot to work with, and yet the film’s emotional measure is the bond she establishes in a few scenes. EO shared the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2022 and was nominated for the Academy Award for international feature. Drzymalska received her first nomination for best actress at the Polish Film Awards. A second, in the supporting category, followed for Michał Kwieciński’s Filip, the wartime drama led by Eryk Kulm Jr.

The year that changed her standing was 2024. In Marcin Koszałka’s White Courage, about the Goralenvolk, the Podhale highlanders who collaborated with the Nazi occupiers, she played Bronka, loved by the mountaineer Jędrek, played by Filip Pławiak, and married off by family decision to his older brother Maciek. At the Gdynia festival that September she won the award for best leading actress. In Adrian Panek’s Simona Kossak she took the title role: the biologist who left Kraków for a forester’s lodge in the Białowieża Forest and lived there with the animals she studied. Both performances were nominated for best actress at the Polish Film Awards the following spring. She also turned up in Julia von Heinz’s Treasure, the father-and-daughter road film with Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry.

The prizes hide an awkward fact. Bronka is not the centre of White Courage. The film belongs to the brothers and to the collaboration plot, and a Polish critic who calls her a specialist at what she does has argued that her Gdynia award, deserved as it was, rewarded a supporting part filed in the wrong category. Simona Kossak exposed the opposite problem. Reviewers who praised her without reservation, one of them writing that she does not so much play Kossak as become her, also found the film too flat to show who the woman actually was, a biopic that read like an encyclopaedia entry. In Disney+‘s The Breslau Murders, the 1936 crime series set in the city before the Berlin Olympics, she played Lena, wife of Tomasz Schuchardt’s police commissioner, a role one critic found too often written as a woman in danger waiting for rescue. The pattern repeats: the scripts hand her the object, and she has to make it a person.

The Doll is the test of how far that can go. Bolesław Prus’s novel has been read for more than a century through Wokulski’s obsession, with Izabela as the empty surface he projects onto. Maślona’s version, written with Paweł Demirski and Jagoda Dutkiewicz, again pairs Drzymalska with Schuchardt as Wokulski and presents her unavailability as a deliberately built image rather than a void. One foreign reviewer singled out the unpredictability of her performance, and What’s on Netflix described her Izabela as played with steely resolve. The series premiered on 16 September and Netflix lists it as a limited series. The Kawalski film, with Urzędowska and Marcin Dorociński as Wokulski, followed in cinemas on 30 September.

Her next role is a woman the public believed it already owned. On 27 November, Kino Świat releases Violetta Villas, Karolina Bielawska’s film about the Polish singer whose career ran from Polish radio to Paris and Las Vegas and whose last years became tabloid material. Drzymalska plays Villas, and the story is told through the eyes of her son. It is a title role in a story the audience thinks it knows, and it puts the question of her career at full scale: whether an actress can take back a woman whom everyone else, from impresarios to the press, has already decided about.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Tomasz Schuchardt, EO, Jerzy Skolimowski, Sandra Drzymalska, The Doll

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