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Alice Braga

Alice Braga has built a screen career that crosses Brazilian cinema, Hollywood genre movies and long-form television without losing sight of where it began. Born in São Paulo on April 15, 1983, she encountered acting early through her mother, Ana Braga, and her aunt, Sônia Braga, both actresses. After school plays and a yogurt commercial at the age of eight, she made her acting debut in the Portuguese-language short Trampolim in 1998. Her breakthrough arrived with City of God in 2002. As Angélica, Braga became part of one of the defining Brazilian crime films of its period and received a Best Supporting Actress nomination from the Cinema Brazil Grand Prize. She followed it with Brazilian productions including Lower City and Only God Knows, while also appearing in the television program Carandiru, Outras Historias. Journey to the End of Night marked her English-language debut, but I Am Legend brought her to a much wider international audience. A strong run of genre work followed, including Redbelt, Blindness, Repo Men and Predators. Braga often brings a grounded presence to heightened material, whether playing Isabelle amid the extraterrestrial hunt of Predators or Frey Santiago in Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium. Her work has also continued across Latin American productions, including the Brazilian jungle film The Ardor and the Argentine romance drama Latitudes. Television gave Braga one of her most substantial roles. From 2016 to 2021, she led the crime drama Queen of the South, her first lead role in an American television series. She later played Maggie Teixeira in Luca Guadagnino’s HBO miniseries We Are Who We Are. Her more recent film roles include Cecilia Reyes in The New Mutants and an appearance in The Suicide Squad. Fluent in Portuguese, English and Spanish, Braga has shaped a career that moves naturally between languages, countries and formats, with crime stories, science fiction and action providing some of her most visible work.