Alice Braga
Alice Braga is an actor, born 1983.
Alice Braga was born in Sao Paulo in 1983 and got out through City of God, which she made as a teenager and which exported an entire generation of Brazilian actors. Hollywood took a while to decide what to do with her. The answer, for about a decade, was science fiction.
She is the person a genre film puts opposite its star to make the world feel inhabited: Anna in I Am Legend, the mercenary Isabelle in Predators, Frey in Elysium, a doctor in The New Mutants, a squad member in The Suicide Squad. None of these are showy parts and she plays them with an unusual lack of vanity, letting the film's grime sit on her rather than performing survival. Predators is the best of them, largely because it lets her be competent without stopping to explain why.
Queen of the South was the correction. Five seasons as Teresa Mendoza, a woman who starts with nothing and builds an organisation, gave her the lead nobody had offered her in film, and it is a harder performance than the show's pulp reputation suggests: she has to carry a story that escalates every season without ever raising her voice to do it. Since then she has produced as well as acted, kept a foot in Brazilian cinema, and moved into prestige streaming with Dark Matter in 2024 and a Netflix take on Man on Fire.
Movies (23)
- Soul (2020)
- The Suicide Squad (2021)
- I Am Legend (2007)
- City of God (2002)
- The New Mutants (2020)
- Predators (2010)
- The Shack (2017)
- Elysium (2013)
- The Rite (2011)
- Repo Men (2010)
- Hypnotic (2023)
- Blindness (2008)
- On the Road (2012)
- Crossing Over (2009)
- Noah's Ark (2024)
- Redbelt (2008)
- The Duel (2016)
- SHARE? (2023)
- 22 vs. Earth (2021)
- Lower City (2005)
- City of God: 10 Years Later (2013)
- The Ardor (2014)
- Kill Me Three Times (2015)
TV (7)
Where to start with Alice Braga
City of God is where to begin, with the warning that her role is small and the film itself is the attraction. It is still the best thing on this page.
For Braga specifically, Queen of the South is the real showcase, five seasons resting entirely on her, and the first season is enough to know whether you want the rest. In film, I Am Legend is the famous one and the least interesting use of her, while Predators is the opposite, a lean B-movie that treats her as the most capable person in the jungle. Elysium slightly wastes her. Lower City is the Brazilian film to seek out if you want to see her before the export, and Soul is a lovely surprise most people do not realise she is in. Dark Matter is the current one.
The Brazilian films
This is the work that matters most and the hardest to find outside Brazil. City of God is where she started at nineteen, and Lower City is the one to seek out, a bleak triangle between two friends and a dancer in Salvador.
Hollywood science fiction
Hollywood cast her almost exclusively in genre and mostly as the one competent person in a collapsing world. I Am Legend is the breakthrough, Elysium the Neill Blomkamp, and Blindness is the Fernando Meirelles adaptation that reunites her with City of God's director.
The television leads
Queen of the South ran five seasons and is the biggest thing she has led. Dark Matter is the recent Apple science fiction, and Soul is the Pixar credit, which is a reminder of how wide the range has quietly become.