Whatever Happened To The Actor Who Played Lana Lang On Smallville?

Back in the early 2000s, Kristin Kreuk seemed to be absolutely everywhere. As the star of The CW's Superman series "Smallville," she became a teen icon in 2001. For six years, she seemed to be in every teen magazine and on every teen's TV screen. After leaving the show in 2007, Kreuk continued acting — but we haven't seen as much of her since she left "Smallville" behind. 

Although Kreuk's career has taken her somewhat away from the super stardom, it seems that that's the way Kreuk likes it. "It was a fantastic experience and I loved doing ['Smallville']," she said in a 2011 interview. "I miss certain people in the show, but I don't miss doing it." Instead, she said she was focusing on "trying to find something I'm passionate about."

So, did she manage to find a project that she could get passionate about? And what has the Canadian actor been up to for the past two decades?

After starring in "Smallville" for seven seasons as Lana Lang, Kristin Kreuk was written off the show during its final season. Lana, who had been Clark Kent's main love interest during the beginning of the show, was written off to make way for Lois Lane to enter the picture. Lana's arc ended when she absorbed Kryptonite and was forced to keep away from Clark.

In 2024, Kreuk opened up about her character's disappearance from the show. "I just wanted her to be off in imaginary land," she said of Lana during an event in Illinois. "I wanted her to keep living the life that she had gone off to live, and I didn't want to bring her back into the world." She also said that she was careful never to think of Lois as "replacing" Lana. "I really struggle with the idea that one woman replaces another woman, and I struggle with the idea that these womens' lives don't continue on, and they aren't full and beautiful lives," she said (via Comic Book Movie).

After leaving "Smallville," Kristin Kreuk's next gig was to play Hannah in "Chuck." Kreuk appeared in four episodes of the show's third season in 2010. Her character was a very short-lived girlfriend of the titular character. 

Fans and critics alike weren't sure what to make of Kreuk's stint on "Chuck." One Entertainment Weekly critic noted that Hannah seemed to be a convenient plot line designed to "show us different aspects" of Chuck's character. One fan was frustrated that Hannah appeared right when things were heating up between Chuck and Sarah. "Dude, weren't you in love with Sarah? Weren't you trying to convince her to forgive you? And now you start to date the first girl who shows interest towards you?" the fan wrote on Reddit. Other fans, however, were disappointed that Kreuk wasn't in the show for longer. "They killed it so quickly. Kruek was a fantastic match for Chuck I thought," they wrote.

As for Kreuk, she seemed thrilled with the job. "I enjoy the ease of the writing," she said in an interview. "There's, like, a certain fluidity to it that I enjoy and there's a flexibility in the way that you can play on set. And that's really fun."

In between taking on TV roles after "Smallville," Kristin Kreuk decided to start her own production company to produce her own work. When asked what was keeping her busy in 2011, Kreuk replied, "I have a production company, Parvati Creative, that I started a couple of years ago with a friend of mine. We've been working pretty hard on developing projects in that way, which is wonderful and challenging."

Kreuk launched Parvati Creative with producer Rosena Bhura, whom she had worked with on the show "Partition" in 2007. According to Kreuk's biography on AAE Speakers, the company was created to make "human-centric films as seen through a female lens. As a producer, Kreuk worked on "Blink," a 2011 short film, and "Space Milkshake," a 2012 film. She later went on to earn producing credits on two TV shows she starred in, "Beauty and the Beast" and "Burden of Truth."

In the future, Kreuk hopes to put even more energy into producing, hoping to work on a project solely as a producer and not as an actor. "I look forward to a project in the future in which I can come on board and not be in front of the camera and put all my energy towards producing," she told Brief Take in 2019.

Kristin Kreuk's next major project came in 2011 with the film "Ecstasy," directed by "Trainspotting's" Irvine Welsh. Kreuk played Heather, a Canadian girl who meets a Scotting drug smuggler and falls into his crowd and into the '90s rave scene. The film marked one of Kreuk's grittiest roles to date. As she told The Daily Record, she didn't have much personal experience with the subject matter. "I used to go with my friend and would just play all night. I was probably the only one who wasn't high. I had a great time," she said.

Welsh went on to gush about Kreuk's work in the film. "Kristin is just fantastic and looks so good on screen. She has this emotional power and sucks you in," he said, adding, ""She is already a huge TV star and is now going to be a huge film star."

Sadly, the film received mixed reviews and didn't exactly go down in history as a cult classic the way Welsh's previous film had done.

In 2012, Kristin Kreuk landed another huge role, starring as Catherine in a modern-day rendition of "Beauty and the Beast" on The CW. In this version of the story, Catherine is a homicide detective who was saved from murder by a "beast." In other words, Kreuk's version was very different from the Disney film. "If I tell people I'm doing a show called 'Beauty and the Beast,' they think it's Belle and yellow dresses and stuff like that — which is absolutely not the world we're working in, although thematically, it's similar," she said to Entertainment Weekly.

For Kreuk, the role meant channeling a new, more authoritative side of her personality. "That's tough for me," she told Collider. "I don't walk into a room with an authoritative stance. I tend to be a little more submissive, even though I think I have a certain amount of strength." Although Kreuk admitted the role initially made her a little "uncomfortable," she embraced it as a new acting "challenge." The show ran for four years.

In 2017, Kristin Kreuk's career took her in a new direction when she was cast as the voice of Kaitlin Lau in the video game "Shuyan Saga." For Kreuk, the world of game voice work was entirely new. "I am not a gamer, so this is not a world that I am super familiar [with]," she said in an interview. She added that in the past, she had always turned down offers to voice video game characters because she didn't "love super violent shooter games." However, "Shuyan Saga" offered something with a narrative she was drawn to. "It's combat, but it also has a narrative that I think is uplifting and inspiring versus something that is a little more cynical," she said of why she chose the game.

For Kreuk, working as a voice actor offered a new challenge. "Voice work is really challenging and specific," she said, explaining that she had to work through the script line by line without a scene partner. Kreuk went on to voice the character again in 2020 for the game "Watch Dogs: Legion."

In 2018, Kristin Kreuk found herself in the headlines after it was reported that she had once been a member of NXIVM, a secret cult-like group in New York run by Keith Raniere. Raniere was accused of controlling and abusing women in the group and even branding them with his initials.

Kreuk revealed that she had in fact been in the group when she was 23 years old. As Kreuk explained in a statement, she thought the group offered "a self-help/personal growth course that helped me handle my previous shyness, which is why I continued with the program." She added that she had never been in the "inner circle" and she had never recruited women as "sex slaves" as some reports had suggested. She concluded her statement saying, "I am deeply disturbed and embarrassed to have been associated with NXIVM. I hope that the investigation leads to justice for all of those affected" (via Elle).

Kristin Kreuk landed yet another starring role in "Burden of Truth" in 2018. Kreuk played Joanna Hanley, a barrister, in the Canadian legal drama. Kreuk was also a producer on the show, and she became involved before the premise had even fully taken shape. "I think I was most excited about being able to be involved, from almost the conception of the show, and being able to shape the character and where she'll grow, so that I can mitigate all of the risks one takes with a TV series," she said to Collider. 

Kreuk was more than happy to move away from the supernatural worlds she had inhabited in "Smallville" and later in "Beauty and the Beast" — because "Burden of Truth" took place firmly in the real world. "It doesn't feel like you're in a constantly heightened state," she said of the change of pace. "There's a little more nuance and the fluctuations live in more of a gray area."

The show ran for four seasons and came to an end in 2021.

In 2022, Kristin Kreuk landed a four-episode arc in the first season of Amazon Prime's hit action series "Reacher." Kreuk played Charlie, the wife of Paul Hubble and the mother of two daughters.

As Kreuk told TV Line, she found herself on the show because her agent was "obsessed" with the original books. Even though Kreuk hadn't been looking for another role and had been looking for more producing roles, "Reacher" made sense for her at the time. "This was a fun thing. I could stay home in Toronto, and it's a small-ish role, so I could do schoolwork and go and play a southern gal from Georgia on a massive action series," she said.

The show also gave her a chance to reunite with Alan Ritchson, who played the titular character in "Reacher" and had previously played Arthur Curry in "Smallville."

In 2022, Kristin Kreuk moved back to Vancouver in British Columbia. The actor was born and raised on the west coast of Canada in Vancouver and even lived at home with her parents while filming "Smallville." Although she never made the move to Los Angeles, she eventually moved to Toronto. "When you move back to Vancouver, it's best to become a stereotype and hike a lot," Kreuk wrote on Instagram when she moved back to her home town.

As Kreuk once explained to Vancouver Magazine, she preferred living in Vancouver even though it might not have been the smartest career move. "It's smarter to move to Hollywood," she confessed. "You get photographed more, you're in the press more, you build your career faster. I've been hesitant, though, because I feel uncomfortable in that atmosphere." It sounds like Kreuk still feels more at home in her home town than anywhere else.

Kristin Kreuk's next role came in 2024 with the Canadian Fox mystery series "Murder in a Small Town," in which she played Cassandra, a librarian who begins solving crimes with the local detective. 

In the show, the small British Columbia town is home to many, many murders. In fact, there's a new murder in basically every episode. As Kreuk explained to E! News, the crimes become a background for the relationship developments in the show. "Those crimes are solved, but it's really a story about love and community and this town," she said. "The murders drive our plot and keep you engaged, and they're thrilling. But it is about those relationships."

In an unusual move from the writers, Kreuk's character's romantic relationship gets started very quickly. As Kreuk told Cinema Blend, she was more than happy to do away with the will-they-won't-they trope. "I love it," she said of the unusually quick romance. "I would happily never watch a will-they-won't-they ever again. [...] Having them enter into a relationship, and then the push and pull and the complications that come out of that, they establish that they care about each other from the start, and then the things that come into play are very real."

Kristin Kreuk didn't go to college right after graduating high school because, as fans can probably guess, she was a little too busy with "Smallville." "I started working when I was 17 and I didn't do my post-secondary education, and I've been working pretty much constantly ever since," she said to the Toronto Star. However, Kreuk eventually got her undergraduate degree at Queen's University, in a course that she completed online. "With history itself as kind of my major focus, I just love learning about the context of our existence; like where we are at now is completely defined by where we have come from. It started with understanding my own personal family history, where our people came from, why they did and how that's linked to events that happened globally, so that kind of started me down the path," she explained.

Kreuk later decided to go further with her academic work and got a Master's Degree. "I did my Master's in History," she said. She added that she was considering another degree. "I thought about a Master's... well, I don't want to go to campus, so I'm kind of hunting, I don't know yet," she said during a panel at C2E2 in 2023, adding, "I don't want to jump into something until I have, like an area that I want to research." 

These days, it seems that Kristin Kreuk is enjoying a quiet, simple life whenever she can. While she is still busy with her acting work, along with her academic work and her producing work, her daily life in her 40s seems to be all about embracing the simple pleasures. On her 41st birthday, the actor took to Instagram to share some thoughts and some photos of life in her 40s.

"I have nothing profound for y'all," she reflected. "The pictures are from recent days and many of my favorite things." As she explained, her life was filled with "walks and nature and books [...] and travels and old buildings and the friends and family that live just beyond the camera's lens." Sounds like Kreuk knows exactly what matters in life and is putting her energy in all the right places.