Francesca Noel

Noel's screen career starts taking shape around 2018, with the short film *Star People*, and she followed that with *Selah and the Spades* — shot in 2019, released in 2020 — where her role as Amber Bolfo in Tayarisha Poe's boarding-school power drama gave her a platform inside the Sundance ecosystem that clearly mattered. The film was developed through Sundance Labs and distributed by Amazon, putting her in front of a serious industry audience early. The real inflection point was *R#J* (2021). Carey Williams's film — which tells the Romeo and Juliet story entirely through the characters' phone screens, complete with TikTok-style overlays and live-streaming grief — could've been a gimmick. It wasn't, and Noel's Juliet is a big reason why. There's a scene late in the film where she's essentially performing heartbreak into a phone camera, and the artifice of the format somehow makes it land harder, not softer. Refinery29 called her one of Sundance 2021's "Unforgettable Breakout Stars," and the film's title was officially stylized *R#J* to reflect its format — a detail that tells you everything about how committed the production was to the concept. She's also been building a parallel track as a writer-producer. *Redder* (2020), a short film, carries both her writing and producing credits, and she's attached as executive producer on *La Piñata*, which is currently in post-production. On the acting side, 2023 brought the short *Sabor*, and 2025 has been her busiest year yet: she appeared in *Pools* as Shane, and — the biggest platform jump of her career — she stars as Alex Diaz in *Goosebumps: The Vanishing* on Disney+. The series, which co-stars David Schwimmer, Jayden Bartels, and Sam McCarthy, ranked in Disney+'s Top 5 upon release (IMDb / Goosebumps Wiki). Hard to say if the franchise bump translates into the kind of long-term visibility she'd get from a prestige drama, but the audience reach is undeniable.