Laia Costa

Costa's earliest screen credits came through Spanish television — she appeared in the Catalan-language series Polseres vermelles in 2013 (TMDB), one of several minor roles before her international breakthrough. Hard to say if those early parts hinted at what was coming, but they didn't last long as her primary calling card. Victoria (2015) is where everything shifted. The Sebastian Schipper-directed German thriller — shot in a single, unbroken 138-minute take across real Berlin locations in the early hours of a single morning — put Costa at the center of one of the more audacious filmmaking experiments of that decade. She played a young Spanish woman who falls in with a group of strangers whose night spirals badly out of control. Variety reported that the film's technical achievement was inseparable from Costa's performance, which had to sustain genuine emotional escalation across the entire runtime with no second takes. She won the Deutscher Filmpreis (German Film Award) for Best Actress, becoming the first foreign actress to win a Lola (Wikipedia), and received a BAFTA Rising Star Award nomination — two markers that don't usually arrive together for a debut lead. The years that followed were dense. Between 2017 and 2018 alone, Costa appeared in Newness, Only You, Piercing, Duck Butter, and Life Itself — a run that covered romantic drama, horror, comedy, and ensemble storytelling in quick succession (TMDB). She also featured in the HBO Europe romance series Foodie Love (2019), the financial drama Devils (2020), and the sci-fi anthology Soulmates (2020) (TMDB). Her Spanish-language performance as Amaia in Lullaby (2022) became, according to awards tallies, the most decorated turn of Spain's awards season that year — she took home the Goya Award for Best Actress, a Feroz Award, a Forqué Award, and a Platino Award (TMDB). A second Platino Award followed for the rural drama Un amor (2023). Her casting as Moghedien in Amazon's The Wheel of Time (2023–2025) marked her highest-profile English-language franchise role to date (TMDB), with Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026) arriving next on her slate.