Ariela Barer
Ariela Barer is an actor, born 1998.
Adapting a book with no story in it is an unusual problem to set yourself early in a career. Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an argument, a work of political non-fiction with no characters and no plot, and Ariela Barer co-wrote, produced and starred in the film built on top of it. The solution was to graft the argument onto a heist structure: a small crew, a stretch of Texas pipeline, and a script that lets each of them explain themselves without the film turning into a debate. It premiered in competition at Toronto in 2022 and was released through Neon.
Before that she was a working television actor from childhood. She appeared in An American Girl: Chrissa Stands Strong in 2009, then played Carmen on One Day at a Time, Bailey Bennett on Atypical, and Gert Yorkes in Marvel's Runaways, the sardonic one with the dinosaur, which is the role most people recognise her from.
The recent work has been more selective: Mel in The Last of Us, Ziggie in Rebel, Chloe in the Saved by the Bell revival, and Lacey in Disfluency. See You When I See You is due in 2026.
The interesting thing about the career is that the acting increasingly looks like the smaller half of it.
Movies (4)
TV (6)
Where to start with Ariela Barer
How to Blow Up a Pipeline is the one, and it is the one she made. Watch it for the construction as much as the politics: a tight, cheap, extremely well-cut thriller that takes its characters' reasoning seriously without endorsing all of it, and Xochitl is the nearest thing it has to a centre.
For the acting on its own terms, Marvel's Runaways is the long-form showcase. Gert is written as the group's conscience and its heckler at once, and Barer gets more comic mileage out of that than the show seems to have expected.
One Day at a Time is the warmest thing here and a genuinely good sitcom, Atypical is the gentler drama, and The Last of Us is the biggest production she appears in, though the part is small. Disfluency is the low-key indie if you want her outside a franchise.