B.J. Novak

J. Novak (birthname: Benjamin Joseph Manaly Novak) is a veteran TV writer and director, essayist, book author, and most recently, feature film director. He appeared in 166 episodes, wrote 15 episodes, and directed nine episodes of the U.S. (NBC) version of The Office, starring Steve Carell.

Novak was also a writer-actor-director on the hit comedy series, The Mindy Project, for which he received a Writers Guild of America Award for Best New Series—something he also received for The Office.

Novak has had small supporting roles in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007), with Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl; Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), with Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, and Michael Fassbender; voice roles in The Smurfs (2011) and The Smurfs 2 (2013); Shawn Levy’s The Internship (2013), with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn; The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), with Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, and Jamie Foxx; and John Lee Hancock’s biopic, The Founder (2016), with Michael Keaton, Nick Offerman, and John Carroll Lynch.

Novak had a somewhat larger role, as Mary Poppins co-composer, Robert B. Sherman, in John Lee Hancock’s Disney biopic, Saving Mr. Banks (2013), with Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, Paul Giamatti, Jason Schwartzman, and Colin Farrell.

More recently, Novak has turned to feature filmmaking. He is the star-writer-director of the Blumhouse-produced black comedy, Vengeance (2022), with Boyd Holbrook, Issa Rae, and Ashton Kutcher, which premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and was theatrically distributed by Focus Features.