Giselle Itié

Itie was born in Mexico City in 1981 and built her career in Brazil, which is why the one credit most of the world knows is the least representative thing she has done. She started in 2001 on Brazilian television, taking Lola in the period adaptation Os Maias, then Esperanca the following year and Comecar de Novo in 2004.

The breakthrough was Bela, a Feia in 2009, the Brazilian version of Yo soy Betty, la fea, with Itie in the title role. That is a specific and underrated skill set. Telenovela leads work at industrial speed across a very long run, and the good ones learn to play sincerity with none of the protection a two-hour film gives you.

Then Sylvester Stallone cast her as Sandra in The Expendables in 2010, one of the few women in a film about ageing action stars, and it became her international calling card despite being a fraction of her actual output. Even the making-of documentary, Inferno, is in the record, which tells you how much attention that shoot attracted.

Since then she has stayed largely inside Brazilian production: Zipora in the very popular Moses and the Ten Commandments and again in its 2016 feature version, Manuela in Mascaras, Selena Falcon in Belaventura, and Luciana in the 2025 Perfect Strangers. It is a career that reads thinly from outside Brazil and substantially from inside it.