María Gabriela de Faría

De Faría's career started — and for a while, stayed — firmly in the world of Nickelodeon Latin America. Her breakout was Isa TKM, where she played Isabella "Isa" Pasquali, a role that made her a known quantity across South American youth audiences (Wikipedia). She followed that with Grachi (2011–2013) as Mia Novoa and then Yo soy Franky (2015–2016) as the title-adjacent Franky Andrade — three consecutive series that kept her continuously visible through most of the decade. That's a solid run by any measure. The 2019 season marked a real turning point. Deadly Class, the Syfy series based on Remender's graphic novel about a school for assassins, cast her as Maria Salazar — a character with considerably more edge than anything in her Nickelodeon catalog. The same year, she appeared in A Very Moody Christmas (later associated with The Moodys) as Cora (TMDB). Neither project made her a household name in the U.S., but they demonstrated range and opened doors. She kept working across formats: El Exorcismo de Dios (2021) put her in horror territory as Esperanza, and smaller roles in Animal Control (2023) and The Duel (2023, as Aphrodite) showed she wasn't waiting around for one defining opportunity. That opportunity arrived anyway. Cast as Angela Spica / The Engineer in Superman (July 2025) — James Gunn's reboot of the DC Studios franchise — de Faría stepped into one of the more conceptually strange characters in the film: a woman who has literally replaced her blood with nanotechnology, giving herself a form of living metal biology. It's a role that demands physical presence and a certain kind of controlled intensity, and by most accounts she delivers. Whether this translates into a longer DC franchise commitment remains to be seen, but landing a named role in what is arguably the most scrutinized superhero relaunch in years is, by any reasonable standard, a breakthrough moment for an actress who spent most of her career working outside the English-language mainstream.