Culture
Laysla De Oliveira
Laysla De Oliveira: The Life She Imagined
Words by Teneshia Carr
For years, Laysla De Oliveira lingered on the threshold, hoping for the role that would finally welcome her inside. Now, as the star of Lioness, she is discovering that success is not a single destination but a mosaic of unforgettable moments.
Laysla De Oliveira’s tears flow most freely when happiness finds her. Sometimes, in the midst of a bustling film set, surrounded by lights, cameras, and the quiet choreography of crew members building new worlds, she pauses. She takes in the faces around her, marvels at the unlikely path her life has taken, and is swept away by the journey that brought her here.
“I’m the person that, when I show up to set, I get so overwhelmed with gratitude and emotion,” she says. “I’ll just look around and cry. I’m an emotional being, but I’m just so happy. I think it’s important to celebrate the wins when you can.”
Her journey has been marked by many victories. In the Tall Grass, the haunting Netflix adaptation of Stephen King and Joe Hill’s novella, unveiled her to audiences worldwide. Locke & Key let her slip into the dangerously alluring skin of Dodge. Then came Lioness, Taylor Sheridan’s taut espionage drama, where De Oliveira channels a raw, physical intensity as Cruz Manuelos. The role placed her shoulder to shoulder with Zoe Saldaña, Nicole Kidman, and Morgan Freeman—icons from the world she once only dreamed of joining.
Yet, as she has learned, success rarely matches the picture we paint from afar. It looks solid and unmistakable from a distance, a finish line after which all is clear. But once inside, the horizon keeps shifting, always just out of reach.
“The craziest part of all of it is that you don’t feel like you’ve made it,” she says. “If three- or four-years-ago me looked at me now, and the people I work with and the world I’m getting to explore, I would have been like, ‘Girl, we are good. We did it.’ But when you’re in it, that needle just keeps pushing forward.”
De Oliveira grew up in Canada within a Brazilian family, in a household where dreams of an artistic life felt far from guaranteed. Her mother arrived in Canada with almost nothing, armed only with the grit of someone who had faced true hardship. The gulf between those beginnings and her own life now is immense. Yet De Oliveira recounts it plainly, refusing to turn her story into legend. For her, these were not tales burnished by nostalgia, but the everyday truths that shaped her childhood.
“In my heart, I always wanted to be an actress,” she says. “I just didn’t have anybody in my family who did it. I didn’t even know that it could be a job.”
Modeling was the first door to open. Tall and striking, she often heard she belonged in front of a camera. As a teenager, she drifted to sleep wishing for discovery. When a major Toronto agency finally signed her, it felt like a step closer to her dreams, but it could not quiet the longing to lose herself in a story.
“Acting is what makes my heart sing,” she says. “Creating something.”
Commercial work gave her an early taste of performance. A high school drama class gave that desire a name. When one of her teachers pulled her aside and told her she could become an actress, those few words created an opening where none had existed before.
“I needed someone to look me in the eye and say, ‘You can do this,’ even though you don’t know anybody who knows how to do this,” she remembers.
She switched to an arts school, immersed herself in theater, and started auditioning early. What followed was nearly ten years of searching for her place in an industry that struggled to envision women like her in leading roles. When De Oliveira began, the heroine was out of reach; the best friend lingered quietly at the margins.
“When I started at 20, there weren’t a lot of people who looked like me that had the lead parts,” she says. “It was the best friend role. I’m a five-foot-nine girlie who people consider to be a model. I wasn’t necessarily right for the best friend role all the time.”
She was working, but often beyond the public’s view. Pilots came and disappeared. Each unrealized project required her to begin again. In retrospect, even the disappointments seem to belong to the architecture of what followed. A final pilot failed to move forward, leaving her available for the film that would change her career.
“When you’re an actor and you’re just knocking on doors and nobody’s opening them, you know it takes that one,” she says. “I felt like In the Tall Grass was the one for me. And it was.”
The cast gathered in Stratford, Ontario, filming among fields of grass so sharp they left arms scratched and stinging. The production was intimate, stripped of any glamour. De Oliveira was elated. She had been given the weight of a film to carry, and she understood the significance of that trust.
From that moment, her world expanded. Locke & Key arrived, then Lioness. Cruz was the kind of role De Oliveira craved: physically demanding, emotionally layered, and impossible to sum up in a single look.
Beneath the soldier’s rigid exterior lived a woman brimming with longing, anger, and a fierce desire to belong.
“Her heart and her story were so deep, and I wanted to explore that depth,” she says. “I love feeling. I love creating feeling for people. Although she is incredibly physical, there was so much depth and feeling there.”
Working beside Saldaña, Kidman and Freeman became an education in presence. No formal lessons or whispered instructions passed between scenes. They met one another as professionals, doing the work together. What De Oliveira learned arrived quietly, through observation and instinct.
“Every day you’re learning by osmosis alone,” she says. “I really realize that I’ve learned something when I go onto another set. I can read the room and what we’re doing so differently now.”
The severity of her on-screen roles can obscure how playful she is in life. People who meet her often ask when she will do a romantic comedy. Saldaña has asked her the same question. De Oliveira is ready for the shift. She dreams of comedy and speaks with infectious excitement about Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing, the fantasy romance she devoured after discovering that reading while listening helped her navigate dyslexia. Somewhere between dragons, warriors, and desire, she recognized another world she would happily inhabit.
Her ambitions remain expansive, but so does her appetite for the pleasures surrounding the work. She believes in caring for her body, taking the trip and occasionally buying the beautiful thing that turns effort into something tangible.
“We need to normalize being a lover of things,” she says. “I think it’s okay to treat yourself with a little something that reminds you of all the hard work you did that year.”
Still, the deepest luxury is experience. It is a vacation shared with someone she loves, a memory made far from home or a quiet instant on set when she allows herself to understand that the life she once prayed for has arrived.
“I think made it is made of moments,” she says.
For De Oliveira, that may be the real shape of success. It is never one door opening or one role that changes everything. It is the accumulation of small, luminous proofs: the work, the journey, the tears, and the sudden recognition that she is standing inside a life she once could only imagine.
Photographer Ari Michelson
Styling Maren Taylor
hair Jerrod Roberts
Makeup Fiona Stiles