“She’s the kind of person who instantly occupies any room she enters,” the director Christian E. Christiansen says about his leading lady in On the Edge, which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January. “She has so much presence that I actually had to tone it down a bit to get the proper balance in the scenes.”

Overnight sensation hardly seems to cut it when describing 28-year-old Danica Curcic’s sudden rise to fame.

With her dark beauty and flowing black mane, the tall, commanding Curcic in many ways is a new type of young woman in Danish films.

She has so much presence that I actually had to tone it down a bit to get the proper balance in the scenes.Christian E. Christiansen, director

Serbian born and bilingual, she came to Denmark with her Serbian family at age one and has been living here ever since, though without ever becoming Danish all the way through.

“I’m probably a bit Balkan, both in my body language and temperament and in my desire to get to the meat of things. It can be a little weird to feel neither 100 percent Danish nor 100 percent Serbian. But I always tried to look at it as an advantage more than as some kind of rootlessness,” says Danica Curcic, whose given name actually means “from Denmark.”

Stage and Screen Success

By the time she graduated from the Danish National School of Performing Arts in 2012, Curcic had already played three roles on the national stage, including a critically lauded performance in the demanding, erotic title role of Frank Wedekind’s classic Lulu.

This year, she is starring in four Danish films, including Bille August’s intimate family drama Silent Heart and The Absent One, the sequel to last year’s noir blockbuster The Keeper of Lost Causes.

Powerful Sensuality

Curcic was just 21 when she got her BA in film and media studies at the University of Copenhagen. She then spent the next year at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in California.

Having seen the world, Curcic is now devoting herself to an acting career in Denmark.

It can be a little weird to feel neither 100 percent Danish nor 100 percent Serbian. But I always tried to look at it as an advantage.Danica Curcic

While movie-going audiences are only now getting to see her in big, demanding roles, we have been treated to flashes of her temper and powerful sensuality in the TV series The Bridge II (2013), where she plays a teacher who has an illicit affair with a female student, and in Laurits Munch-Petersen’s horror film Over the Edge (2012), where she is the other woman – all exotic, enigmatic allure opposite the heroine’s blond normality. In the film, she even got a chance to show off her chops at the piano, playing Erik Satie’s classic Gnossienne No. 4 – a recording that actually made it into the film.

Now, in Christian E. Christiansen’s On the Edge, about a group of young speed-obsessed amateur race car drivers, Curcic stands out as a university student who is significantly smarter than the male protagonists.

All that presence and exotic allure …